Monthly Archives: February 2005

Fred Kaplan on why the DVDs from Warner Home Video look better than those from many other companies.

Several folks have written me to say that Sandra Dee was not in the Oscarcast "In Memoriam" segment because it was for 2004 deaths and she died in 2005. This is not the case. Yeah, she passed away on 2/20/05 but Ossie Davis died on 2/4/05 and he was in there. The rule, as I understand it, is that the montage is for those who've left us since the last montage was assembled. Most likely, this year's was already finished when Ms. Dee died — which, by the way, was the same day John Raitt died — and I guess the decision was made not to go back in and re-edit to include them. Presumably, they would have done this for someone a lot more prominent.

It has also been pointed out to me that John Vernon didn't make it in. And while Fred Ebb's most important work was for the stage, he did write for movies and had two Oscar nominations, one of them only two years ago. He also co-wrote "New York, New York" which, amazingly, was not nominated for an Academy Award but which may well be the most popular song ever written for a motion picture. (The winner that year was "You Light Up My Life." When was the last time you heard that one?)

Someone else wrote to ask me who I'd like to see host the Oscars. If it were up to me, I'd ask Albert Brooks or Tom Hanks…and perhaps they have. But if Steve Martin were willing to do it again, I'd give him the job for life.

And now, I've taken the extra "L" out of Hilary Swank's first name. Thanks to Clifford Weimer Jr. for pointing that one out to me.

Just fixed the spelling of Martin Scorsese's name in several earlier entries. I thought it was "Scorcese" and a Google search shows that a lot of other folks who oughta know better think so, too. But Charlie Eckhaus is a smart guy and he alerted me. Thanks, Charlie.

Former California governor (now mayor of Oakland) Jerry Brown has set up his own weblog, and he seems to be actually writing it.

Ratings for last night's Oscars seem to be up a bit over the last few years. That oughta make the folks at ABC happy because they probably felt they had an uninteresting batch of nominations this year, and that the average viewer out there really didn't care that much if Clint beat Martin or if Hilary beat Kate. There was no blockbuster, high-grossing film in competition or no backstory that might yield some great emotional moment. The only real suspense was whether Chris Rock would spin wildly out of control, which may have been why that possibility was hyped as much as it was. As I said, I thought Rock did a decent job, though I'm guessing he won't be asked back for quite a while. He may have exhausted his value just by not saying something that outraged America and caused the Kodak Theater to implode.

Reading Internet forums this morn, I sense a bit of disappointment that nothing that memorable occurred — no wildly ridiculous outfits, no over-the-top political moments, no tearful meltdowns from the winners, no gasping surprise when some envelope was opened. Who would have thought Chris Rock would preside over one of the safest Oscar ceremonies in recent memory?

Final thoughts for the evening…

• Shelly Goldstein just called to point out another notable omission from the "In Memoriam" montage: Sandra Dee. I know she only died last week but they could have included her if they'd made the effort.
• They cut Hilary Swank off in mid-acceptance speech but seemed to let Jamie Foxx go on as long as he wanted. I think the rule should be that you get 60 seconds unless you mention your agent, manager or lawyer, in which case you get 20.
• If someone tells you that it's unfair that Scorsese has never won, ask them just when he should have won and why that should affect this year. The Oscars are not a cumulative exercise. At least in theory, it's one competition at a time, and your past excellence does not make your current effort the Best Picture of the Year. He probably should have won for Taxi Driver (he wasn't nominated that year) but when he was up for Raging Bull, he was beaten by Robert Redford for Ordinary People, which was not an unworthy effort. I would have given it to him for Goodfellas over that year's winner, Kevin Costner for Dances With Wolves…but that's history. They shouldn't not give it to Clint this year because Martin got swindled in 1990.
• And no matter what, he's still Martin Scorsese. Even without an Oscar, he's still honored, well-paid and able to make the movies he wants, pretty much the way he wants. In the pantheon of Great Injustices, this doesn't even make the top One Million. Besides, the way he's going, he still has time to either make a couple more Oscar-class movies…or at least win a Lew Wasserman look-alike contest.
• One thing the show lacks for me is a sense of "Old Hollywood" somewhere in there. If it were up to me, I'd have at least one award presented by someone who hasn't made a movie lately but used to be in a lot of them…say, Jerry Lewis or Elizabeth Taylor. As it is, we seem to only get the annual audience shot of Mickey Rooney.
• It was a very fast-moving Oscarcast…almost too fast in spots. I know people hate long acceptance speeches, especially from "nobodies." But that guy winning for Best Sound Production…you're seeing maybe the high moment in his life, and perhaps his first taste of true, meaningful recognition. Clint Eastwood has had plenty of honors…and even if he went home without an Oscar, he'd still be Clint Eastwood. I'd rather see the musical numbers trimmed and the time given over to letting the winners say a little more than that they thank everyone else who worked on the project and that they love their spouse.
• I thought Chris Rock did an okay job as host…better than Whoopi or Dave, not as good as Billy or Steve. Actually, as they increasingly streamline the show, the host becomes largely irrelevant after about the first half-hour. I expect that those who were looking to be outraged at the "Hollywood elite" showing its contempt for traditional values will pounce on the Bush jokes and condemn the whole broadcast. So they should be happy with it, even as they proclaim how much they hated it.

Well, that's it from Tinsel Town. I'm going back to working on a screenplay which will probably not be nominated…next year, or ever.

Catching up on the Oscar telecast…

• I think I see the nature of the "empty seat" problem. When the Academy Awards were done from other venues, the cameras mostly showed you the front audience section, so when Jack Nicholson went out for a smoke, a Seat Filler could scurry down, sit in his chair and the home viewers wouldn't see that even the stars couldn't sit through the whole ceremony. But here at the Kodak Theater, they want to show the size of the place, so we get a lot of shots of the balcony and of the whole audience…and the Seat Fillers can't be running up and filling in empty spaces in Row YY, Third Tier.
• Sorry to see that Paul Haggis didn't win for Best Screenplay. I haven't seen the movie, but Paul did a great job writing cartoon scripts for me back when I was story-editing at Hanna-Barbera. You'd like to see that kind of ascendancy rewarded.
• Nice to see that one of our greatest dramatic actors, Al Pacino, can't read a TelePrompter any better than most people.
• Honorary Oscar for Sidney Lumet? Sure. He should've gotten one around half-past Network.
• There's something very nice about any audience shot that includes Alan Alda…which since he's sitting behind Scorsese, is a lot of them. Even though he lost, he seems so happy to be there. He's not worried about how he'll come across on camera or how he looks. He's just enjoying himself.
• Ah. While I was typing the above, they introduced Martin Scorsese as a presenter. As he walked out, they cut to a shot of Alan Alda…and someone had the good sense not to stick a Seat Filler into Scorsese's seat in front of him.
• Obit film time. They solved the Reagan/Brando problem by opening with the former, closing with the latter. And they included Russ Meyer, which was nice. But no Arthur Miller, Cy Coleman or Fred Ebb? (Okay, they didn't do their major work directly for the screen…but didn't Mr. Ebb's Chicago win a few Oscars not long ago?) Alan King wasn't there but he was in plenty of movies, plus he co-hosted the Academy Awards at least once.
• Classy (if awkward) attempt by Sean Penn to rebut the host's monologue slam at Jude Law.
• As Hilary Swank walked to the stage to accept, the v.o. pointed out that she was the first actress to be nominated for an Oscar for playing a boxer. Uh, is this a large group from which she has managed to distinguish herself?

Okay, through the miracle of TiVo fast-forwarding, I've caught up with real time. Watching live now…

I'm watching the Oscars off-and-on, hit-and-miss. Here are some thoughts about what I've seen so far…

• I don't understand why Chris Rock got a standing ovation just for showing up for work. But then, I think audiences have cheapened the whole concept of the standing-o down to near-meaningless. You now get one just for appearing on The Tonight Show.
• That said, I thought Rock did a great monologue but it may have been in the wrong room. The stuff bashing actors like Jude Law was funny but I'm not sure it belongs at the Oscars. The evening's supposed to be about celebrating excellence and while that doesn't mean everything has to be positive, there are times when a comic's "bully pulpit" is so powerful that it ought to be used sparingly to insult people. The Bush-bashing was much the same: Funny but maybe not the right time or place.
• The idea of presenting certain awards from the audience must have sounded good in the meetings but it just looks awkward here. Betcha we don't see it again.
• I can't quite explain why but I'm always bothered by these audience reaction shots that seem intended to show the jokes are harmless. If someone makes a joke about black people, we suddenly have to cut to a black person laughing. How about embracing the idea that everyone finds the line funny?
• I keep seeing empty seats in the audience shots. It's 20 minutes in. People shouldn't be going out to make cellphone calls quite this early, and the Seat Fillers should be faster on the sit.
• At some point in the career of Joan Rivers, I got real sick of the nasty, gratuitous jokes she was making about Elizabeth Taylor being fat, Madonna being loose, etc. I'm starting to feel that way about jokes about Joan being hideous and inhuman. I know it's a taste of her own medicine but that doesn't mean I have to laugh at it.
• No comment on the winners so far. No big surprises, and I doubt anyone's expecting any. If Jamie Foxx doesn't win for Ray, even the Diebold people will scream fraud.

I'm going to take a walk and get some dinner. Through the miracle of TiVo, I'll catch up on the proceedings later.

One other interesting Oscar thought…

A job I'm glad I don't have is assembling the annual montage of folks who've died since the last Academy Awards. This year, it'll include Christopher Reeve, Rodney Dangerfield, Janet Leigh, Tony Randall, Alan King, Paul Winfield, Cy Coleman, Arthur Miller, Peter Ustinov and many others…but there are some dicey decisions to be made. Neither Johnny Carson nor Ray Charles did much in movies but Carson was a beloved Oscar host, and much of tonight will be about Mr. Charles, anyway. So do they get into the montage? (I'm guessing they'll be remembered in separate sections.) Do you include Russ Meyer, who never made Oscar-worthy material but was one of the most successful moviemakers of all time from a financial sense? (I'm guessing they won't.) And do you close with Marlon Brando, who was probably the most acclaimed film actor of all time…or Ronald Reagan, who wasn't a great actor but did make it to the presidency?

As you might have heard — and as I only heard after writing the preceding — ABC's Standards and Practices folks have vetoed the material that Robin Williams wanted to do at tonight's statue-presenting festival. Here's an article about it, and here's an e-mail from Pat O'Neill…

What do you think the chances are that ABC/Disney's real objections to the song Robin Williams was planning for his gig as presenter of the animation Oscar was that too many of the references were to characters they own and which represent significant marketing revenue…revenue they wouldn't want tainted in any way, including a comedic one? Or am I just a skeptic who looks for hypocrisy everywhere these days?

Well, it's not like there isn't a lot to find. In this case though, I would guess the concern at ABC goes beyond the sanctity of Mickey Mouse. The mindset there is probably that they'd love the Oscars to become an orgy of scandalous remarks and wardrobe malfunctions, just so long as the network could effectively say, "It wasn't our fault. We took all reasonable precautions." The whole Janet Jackson incident did a lot to shake up the television industry, not because anyone was shocked at the quick flash of a breast but because they felt CBS was held unduly and excessively responsible.

There's a little game that is sometimes played at TV networks where you have the Programming Department pressing for more salacious, exploitable content…but the Standards and Practices folks are telling you to tone it down. As a writer or producer, you find yourself trapped in the middle and at first, you want to tell them, "Hey…you guys hammer it out and let me know what the decision is." But what you eventually come to realize is that they want it both ways. They want the steamy stuff because it gets ratings but they also want to be able to say they acted responsibly, cut out the more egregious offenses, etc. A lot of the success stories in television are a matter of being able to navigate that contradiction and satisfy the two opposing concerns at the same time. The networks aren't used to being actually slapped if someone doesn't like something that gets on the airwaves.

A certain amount of the Oscar telecast is simply outside ABC's control. If the Best Supporting Actress gets up there and says George W. Bush should be impeached, it will upset a certain portion of America but they won't be mad at the network; won't even be able to say ABC could have prevented that. The piece Robin Williams was planning to do was prepared material, written in advance. Since it was a piece of music, it would have to be rehearsed before the telecast, which would therefore put ABC on the spot. They couldn't say, "We didn't know what he was going to do" and of course, they couldn't bleep a two-minute bit that had come as no surprise. So they've prohibited it, just out of fear and probably because it's good p.r. with a faction they figure could give them trouble. If Mr. Williams comes out tonight and does something equally provocative as a seeming ad-lib, ABC will be less responsible for it than if they'd allowed the scripted bit.

By the way: In that article, you'll note that one of the Standards and Practices folks at ABC who covers the Oscars is a lady named Susan Futterman. I had a long series of battles with Ms. Futterman (or "Futterperson," as everyone but me called her) when I was writing shows for ABC. At one point, she was in charge of a bunch of Saturday morning shows (one of which I story-edited) and one prime-time show (which I was also writing). So we'd get together several times a week and argue, and in a few cases, I traded off cutting something on one show if she'd allow something else on the other. Most of the Standards and Practices folks with whom I dealt in television came to the post with an attitude of, "Hey, don't blame me if the rules are silly. I'm just in charge of enforcing them." Futterman was the only one I encountered who seemed to fervently believe in the rules and in saving America from her concepts of subversion. Others could be talked out of this or that if you gave them a credible argument which they could repeat to their superiors to explain why they'd let the questionable joke in. Susan never seemed to care what her bosses said. She had her personal sense of morality and was determined to apply it.

At one point in the eighties, a package of classic Warner Brothers cartoons passed from CBS to ABC. CBS had chopped them up a lot, omitting much material that now airs routinely on Cartoon Network and Boomerang without turning America's children into werewolves. When ABC got them back then, they cut everything CBS had cut, plus a lot that CBS had deemed acceptable. That was Futterman at work. She certainly could have justified airing the same prints CBS had been running for years, but she felt some of what the other network had broadcast was unacceptable and that a show on ABC had to conform to her views. I thought she was mistaken about that, and about a lot of the things she cut in other shows, but I had a strange respect for her efforts. At times in show business, it's almost refreshing to see someone making the wrong decision out of principle, as opposed to the right one out of expediency. I haven't dealt with her in decades but I doubt she cares much about the health of Disney licensing. Unless she's changed a lot, she's making her determinations — right, wrong and maddeningly inconsistent — because she really believes something does not belong on network television.

Cruising the blogs, the Oscar predictions seem to be less about what will win than about whether Chris Rock will outrage some section of America. I suspect the answer is yes, not because anything he'll say will be that harsh but because a certain segment of America now actively looks for ways to be outraged and to define Hollywood as some aberrant, elitist cult. Outrage can be a very useful political tool.

A few months ago, it looked like these people were hoping/expecting that Fahrenheit 9/11 would be nominated all over the place while The Passion of the Christ would get shut out. That would have enabled them to raise funds on the premise that "Hollywood" (whoever that is) hates religion but loves America-bashing. Never mind that a lot of very religious people hated the Mel Gibson film or that a lot of good citizens thought the Michael Moore documentary was highly patriotic. It still would have been a good, saleable bit of red state/blue state division, and the whole point of hyped outrage is to make one group of Americans hate another.

Unfortunately, the Academy voters screwed up that marketing plan by not nominating either film. I got a few feeble e-mails from folks trying to sell me on the concept that the absence of a Best Picture nomination for The Passion of the Christ proves that the elitists out here hate religion or Christians or traditional values or something of the sort…but the campaign was a half-hearted exercise. I only bothered to write back to one guy and point out that, first of all, those who cast ballots do not consult Barbra Streisand or one another and come up with one, simple reason for their votes. That presumption is one of the phoniest things about the Oscars…the post-vote simple reason for each win. Tomorrow, we'll hear that the voters picked Clint Eastwood for Best Director because they admired his choice of a non-commercial script…or maybe we'll hear that they went for Martin Scorsese in that category because they felt he's been overlooked for too long. They'll also talk like it was some sort of unanimous viewpoint even though for all we know, the winner may have only won by one vote.

There can be a hundred different motives why ballots go one way or another, just as everyone who voted for John Kerry didn't all have one particular message in mind. A lot of folks probably thought the Mel Gibson film was too violent to honor…or in some cases, even to see. Others may have simply felt not that it was something to be condemned but that it was only the sixth best movie of the year. Whatever the mindsets, it lost its potency as a topic to polarize Americans, helped on by the failure of the Academy to nominate Fahrenheit 9/11, and Mel Gibson's statements of fellowship with Michael Moore. So those who wish to generate outrage tonight are instead going to have to pick through Chris Rock's remarks, and also pray that some winner will say something controversial. They'll probably find what they need.

Maybe it'll be early in the show when Rock needs to prove that just because it's the Oscars and he's in a tux, he's still Chris Rock. Maybe it'll be later when we get some sort of line about how if the show runs any longer, they'll have to get Clint Eastwood up there to put it out of its misery. But the Academy Awards are of no use to these people unless they find some reason to act shocked and to condemn some seemingly-expressed value…so they will. Or, at least, they'll try.

Here we see some promo art for Calvin and the Colonel, the 1961-1962 prime-time animated series. Yesterday afternoon, I went to an A.S.I.F.A. screening of three episodes of the largely-forgotten cartoon show, followed by a panel with some of the folks who worked on it. Like a lot of things from my childhood, it was fun to revisit but I wouldn't want to live there, if you follow me. This was not that great a show, and it's easy to see why it never caught on. First off, it was all talk, no action. Devotees of full animation have often insulted TV animation by calling it "illustrated radio" but Calvin and the Colonel really was. Moreover, the characters weren't all that appealing, falling uncomfortably between between good guys you enjoy seeing win and bad guys you enjoy seeing lose, plus there was a laugh track that makes you want to get up and smack somebody.

There were some clever moments and a jazzy theme song but, like I said, it's not surprising that it didn't make it.

One correction: Earlier, I accidentally wrote that Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll had created Calvin and the Colonel, when I knew full well that the show was created with them in mind by producer-writers Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly. Several folks wrote in so I corrected the record…and then yesterday, watching those episodes, I saw the title card: "Created by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll." So even though I was wrong the first time, I was right the first time…or something like that.

In 2002, the publishing giant known as TwoMorrows Books brought you the acclaimed (by not only them but me, as well) collection, Comic Books and Other Necessities of Life, a must-have paperback full of articles by Yours Truly. In it, I tackled such vital issues of the day as my old comic book club, The Comics Code, crooked model kits and Carl Barks.

In 2003, TwoMorrows yielded to popular demand and released a second collection of my columns. We called this one Wertham Was Right and it included deathless articles about Charles Schulz, Bob Kane, The Fox and the Crow, and why Wertham was and wasn't right.

Then, in 2004, TwoMorrows bowed to the inevitable and brought forth what was surely the third of these volumes, Superheroes In My Pants, which featured the lowdown on unfinanced entrepreneurs, cheap comic book fans, bad convention panels and Julius Schwartz. Another bookshelf essential.

And now, in 2005, I am pleased to announce…no book. Not this year. To have the next collection out for this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego, I'd have to be prepping and editing it about now, and I'm swamped with other work. So I've decided to delay Volume 4 in the series until 2006, and I thought I'd post this to answer the questions I'm getting about when it'll be out, what it will be called and what will be in it. Answers: Next year, I dunno and I dunno — in that order. But I thank you all for your inquiries and interest…and we will get around to more.

June Foray is not only the first lady of cartoon voicing. She's also the author of Perverse, Adverse and Rottenverse — a collection of humorous essays that are no less funny than all those Stan Freberg records and Jay Ward cartoons that featured her. You can order it from BearManor Media by clicking here. Or if you live in Southern California, there's a better way. Wednesday evening, March 9, June will be signing said book at the Barnes & Noble in The Grove, the upscale shopping center affixed to the Farmers Market. She'll be there at 7:30 and so will a lot of her friends and fans. Show up, meet June and get her to sign your copy.