Monthly Archives: June 2005

In addition to voicing an astonishing percentage of the funniest cartoons ever made, Mel Blanc was also an accomplished recording artist. He did funny records for kids, many of them based on his cartoon roles. He also did silly songs for adults and while I have a pretty good-sized collection of them on 78 and 45, I welcome the forthcoming CD from Collectors' Choice Music. Here's a link to the page on which you can order The Best of Mel Blanc, and I sure hope this is Volume One, because as good as the selections are, there's more where that came from. And while you're over there, Collectors' Choice also has The Golden Age of Comedy: Mel Blanc, which offers cuts from Mel's radio work.

And Mel isn't on it, but I have to recommend Ready or Not, which is the CD release of one of Godfrey Cambridge's best comedy albums. Mr. Cambridge is way too forgotten these days, remembered (when he's remembered at all) for that dreadful movie, Watermelon Man. But he really sparkled as a stand-up, and I recall him as one of the first black comics to get mainstream exposure and to make audiences of all colors laugh at race-themed material. This one is worth picking up, too…and to tell you how sincere I am, these aren't even click-through affiliate links. I don't make a nickel when you order from Collectors' Choice.

Fans of the Deep Throat/Mark Felt story will not want to miss this article in The Nation. You'll especially love this aspect of the tale…

…Felt's role as the most famous anonymous source in US history was even more complex and intrigue-loaded than the newly revised public account suggests. According to originally confidential FBI documents — some written by Felt — that were obtained by The Nation from the FBI's archives, Felt played another heretofore unknown part in the Watergate tale: He was, at heated moments during the scandal, in charge of finding the source of Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate scoops. In a twist worthy of le Carré, Deep Throat was assigned the mission of unearthing — and stopping — Deep Throat

No wonder they couldn't catch the guy.

I think I've learned two things by following as much of the Michael Jackson trial as I followed. One is how unbelievably rotten the news coverage of something like this is. You may or may not agree with the verdict but clearly those jurors, like the ones in the Robert Blake case and maybe a few others, did not experience the trial that was described to us by the folks covering it. It's like the story of the blind men all trying to describe an elephant except in this case, you have blind reporters and most of them had their heads up the elephant's ass.

I was tuning in Court TV for five minutes every few hours since "Verdict Watch" commenced and I happened to be watching today when, right in the middle of a story about the prosecution of that Ku Klux Klan member in Mississippi, they cut in to say…well, not that a verdict had been reached. Court TV, with all its correspondents on the scene and all its boasts about providing the most extensive inside coverage, cut in to say that other networks were reporting there was a verdict. A few minutes later, they confirmed it, thereby announcing they'd been scooped.

That had to be embarrassing but not as embarrassing as what followed. That's when we began to get the cavalcade of predictions, almost all of which were dead wrong. I flipped around — CNN, Fox, MSNBC, back to Court TV — and I think I heard one person say Michael would be found "not guilty" on all counts, and even that wasn't so much a prediction as the pundit saying that was what should happen. The consensus was for conviction on some of the charges, usually either all the molestation counts or all the alcohol-related ones. After the jury acquitted on all ten indictments, I scanned the same channels and heard a lot of the same people say, "Well, I expected this," even though an hour earlier, their big debate had been whether Michael could be taken immediately into custody or allowed to post an Appeals Bond. Nancy Grace, the anchor on Court TV, even said of the outcome, "I'm not surprised," after earlier insisting there was no way a jury could fail to convict on some allegations of sexual misconduct.

So that's one thing I learned…not to listen to these people. The other is not so much a lesson as an observation.

A lot of people are saying, or will say, "Michael Jackson was found Not Guilty by reason of Celebrity," and that in California, you can get away with murder (or child rape) if you're famous. I don't know how much truth there is to this, but it occurs to me that there's also a downside to being a famous person who goes on trial.

Before the murders in Brentwood, O.J. Simpson was a guy who lived on his reputation and likability, essentially making a very good income as a famous, beloved football hero. After the acquittal, there was a lot of talk about how he'd build back that fame and fortune with a well-managed campaign of public appearances, book deals, interviews, etc. Anyone remember the big pay-per-view interrogation to be conducted by Larry King? The one they said was certain to net Simpson upwards of seven million clams? Never happened. The closest they came was an anemic VHS tape that sold next to nothing. (I have a copy purchased on eBay for two bucks. It's pretty awful.)

It turned out — and it must have come as a shock to Simpson — that there was no market out there for O.J. None. I remember the guy who bankrolled the tape appearing on Larry King Live, confidently projecting it would be the best-selling videotape of all time. King pointed out that something like 65% of Americans thought Simpson was guilty and might not want to give him money. The producer said, okay, fine. But if even 5% of the remaining 35% buy the tape, it'll make a fortune. Well, it didn't. Total flop. It turned out that even people who thought O.J. didn't do it — check that: people who told pollsters they thought O.J. didn't do it — wouldn't spend money on him. That's why there's been no book by Simpson, no movie (as promised) to give his side of the story, no big comeback. The public has placed him in a kind of purgatory, shunning him, yelling at him when they see him in public, and refusing to allow him to return to his former life as a much-loved star.

I am by no means suggesting that that kind of punishment is an adequate substitute for a proper guilty verdict and a sentence of many decades behinds bars. But it's also not nothing.

Simpson lost his home, his fame, his career, most of his money — all things that one assumes mattered a lot to him. Maybe he did escape long-term incarceration because he was a celebrity…but Celebrity Justice can also involve that other kind of penalty. If a plumber is accused of murder, tried and acquitted, he can go back to fixing toilets. O.J. couldn't go back to sportscasting, doing rent-a-car ads and appearing in bad movie roles.

It's not exactly the same with Michael Jackson. There are still folks out there who love him and who'll buy his albums and attend his concerts, but there aren't as many of them as there used to be and their number will go down, not up. Even if a lot of folks feel that this particular case did not merit a Guilty verdict, they've also decided that his rating on the Creepy Index has risen to a level that can no longer be overlooked because he dances well.

Since I can't do any worse than Nancy Grace did this afternoon, I'm going to make a prediction about Michael. I predict he's going to make a brief comeback — maybe a tour, maybe reuniting with his brothers — but eventually, it's all going to fizzle. The folks who believe he's innocent aren't going to support him for long, or support him with money, just as the folks who believed O.J. was framed didn't support him enough to allow for any sort of post-verdict career. Jackson may do okay in other countries, but his fans in the U.S. are just going to get tired of rationalizing the sleepovers and defending the weirdness. Eventually, he'll receive the same kind of Celebrity Justice that Simpson received…and no, it's not real justice. But it's better than nothing.

Here's my entry into the "What the Democrats Oughta Do whirlwind." I figure, everyone else is playing so I can play, too. What I think they oughta do is find a candidate. I don't think there's anything wrong with the Democratic platform or philosophy or battle plan —

Okay, maybe the battle plan. They're too worried about being called anti-religion or anti-American or anti-family or anti-military, and so they back down, as if the Republicans aren't going to call them all that, anyway. So far, and I may change my mind if he takes it in ugly directions, I like the fact that Howard Dean seems to be moving past all that. He's a good speaker and if he's going to go out there and call this Administration on some of its inconsistencies and misrepresentations, fine. Someone's gotta say it, and Democrats are dumb if they think the press is ever going to fulfill that function.

But as I was saying, I don't think there's anything wrong with what the Democrats are doing except that they don't have a candidate…and at this stage, it doesn't even have to be the person who might really be on the ticket in '08. They just have to prove there'll be some viable choices. Bush is unpopular and getting more so by the minute. More and more, Americans think the War in Iraq just ain't worth what it's costing us in lives (we just passed the 1,700 mark) and grief and money. More and more, Americans see the Bush economic program as a scheme to relieve the Super-Rich of the burden of paying for government and to shift it onto lower and middle-class working stiffs and destroy their Social Security at the same time. Even though Bush himself can't run again, it's a great track record to run against.

The trouble is, you can't beat something with nothing. "The Republican way is bad" is only half the sales pitch. The other half — the half they're missing — is offering up someone who can do better. Who might that be?

I don't think it's Hillary Clinton. Too much baggage. We'd spend the whole election talking about the Clinton marriage and her sexuality and Vince Foster and Whitewater and all those topics that we're all sick of, even if we think they're unfair accusations. We'd wind up talking about everything except what she might do in office. I also don't think it's Joe Biden. He's a smart guy but he seems to have every bad personal quality that made people think Al Gore was a boring policy wonk.

Maybe it's this guy. The link is to a Salon interview with Virginia governor Mark Warner. I don't know a whole lot about him but the last three Democrats who won the White House were all Southerners and that alone makes him worth a look-see. We also seem to like to put governors in the White House, as opposed to senators. The few times I've heard him speak he sounded good, and the interview (which unless you subscribe to Salon can't be read in full without viewing ads or buying a day pass, I believe) has him saying a lot of the right things.

This is not an endorsement. I just think the Democrats need a face to display, and his is the first one that I could begin to imagine on the 2008 presidential ticket. One hopes there will be more from which to pick.

Did you read that piece I wrote earlier about the settlement in the contract for actors who provide voices for video games? Well, Don Porges has some more thoughts on the matter over on his blog.

We've had a lot of items here lately about our dear friend, the late Howard Morris. So I thought I'd mention that one of his big movie roles — Boys' Night Out, co-starring Tony Randall, James Garner, Howard Duff and Kim Novak — airs this coming Thursday morning on Turner Classic Movies. It's not a great film but Howie is fun to watch in it. And if you do tune in, see if you can spot composer-actor Frank DeVol ("Happy" Kyne on the old Fernwood Tonight show) in a funny, unbilled cameo under a lot of make-up.

People have been debating whether Mark "Deep Throat" Felt was a good guy or a bad guy, and these debates often seem to be conducted on the assumption that he had to have been one or the other.

I don't think many public figures — especially in government — can be fit wholly into one of those two classifications, and I see no reason to expect that Mr. Felt can be so tidily rated. His motives in leaking to Bob Woodward were probably some mixture of wanting to protect the FBI from abuse by the Nixon administration and wanting to advance his personal agenda. In the grand scheme of things, I suspect he was less important to the toppling of a president than he was to the career advancement of Woodward and Bernstein. I don't think what he did was dishonorable or illegal — that's the spin of those who cast their lot with Richard M. Nixon — and to the extent he did it to expose corruption, I guess he's a hero.

But only for that one series of actions. He wasn't a hero for what he did soon after. This article tells all about that.

Michael Kinsley thinks the Downing Street Memo is not quite the "smoking gun" that many are making it out to be. I dunno. [Los Angeles Times, might make you register.]

I should have posted this the other day but a potential strike has been averted by actors who provide voices for video games. The rough terms can be read in several articles online like this one. As you'll see, the unions backed down on their demand for residual payments, which is not good. On the other hand, they got a nice increase in up-front fees, and the residuals battle can be fought again another day.

I did want to comment on this paragraph from the article to which I just linked…

Game producers had balked at providing residuals, arguing that people don't buy games because of the actors who appear in them. "That would set a precedent for hundreds of other people who created a game to say, 'What about us?"' industry attorney Howard Fabrick recently told the Los Angeles Times.

Both sentences are a little light on logic. Obviously, the actors are a factor in the sales of a game. If not, the employers would just grab a delivery boy, give him fifty dollars and stick him in front of a microphone. That they pay to get accomplished actors is proof that it does make a difference.

And, yeah, if actors got residuals, then everyone would want residuals. But voice actors have been receiving residuals in conventional animation for many decades, and the producers haven't had a lot of trouble in denying them to everyone else. And directors, writers and actors get residuals on live-action films and TV shows and somehow, this hasn't led to the cameraguys and caterers getting residuals.

One other point: If you Google for some of the other articles on the settlement, you'll see a number which refer to residuals as "profit-sharing." No, residuals are not profit-sharing. Profits are amounts that are calculated based on subtracting what something cost to make from what it grosses. Residuals are fixed fees for re-use that have nothing to do with what a project cost to produce or how much money it took in. This may seem like a trivial distinction but it isn't when you work on a show that's popular enough to be rerun hundreds of times but the studio is still claiming it's not in profit. (Has Paramount stopped claiming that Star Trek lost money?)

Frank Rich discusses the Deep Throat self-outing and the attendant media coverage. Among other observations, he reminds us that the famous D.T. quote, "Follow the money," was a creation of screenwriter William Goldman for the movie of All the President's Men.

In the last ninety minutes, 14 people have written me to say something like Jeremy Bonner wrote in this message…

I can't believe it! I've been hearing that song ("Pop March") in my head for years. A local radio station used it all the time and I never knew its name and I never knew who did it and every so often, I'd think of it and it would drive me bozo. Thank you for resurrecting a mystery and solving it, even though I'll probably be humming it to myself for the rest of the year.

And six of you have sent me this link to a bio of what appears to be the same Johnny Pearson.

We all have certain silly tunes that linger in our memory but defy identification. You heard the song somewhere and it stayed with you…but you have no idea what it's called or who recorded it. If you did, you could maybe procure an actual copy and play it a few times and satisfy some trivial part of your brain and get it out of there forever. But you don't know what the heck it's called and when you try to hum it for your friends or (even more embarrassing) a clerk at a music shop, they don't know what the heck it is, either…and not just because you can't hum.

And then one day if you're fortunate, the mystery is solved. Here is one such story.

Years and years ago — we're talking late sixties/early seventies here — I heard this silly, catchy instrumental that went in my ear and stayed there for decades. I don't know where I first heard it but there's a brief snippet of it in the movie, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, and when I was once introduced to its maker, Russ Meyer, I immediately asked him about it. Mr. Meyer made it clear that he had no idea what song I was talking about, and that even if I could narrow it down for him, it still wouldn't do any good because he didn't know where any of the songs in his movies had come from and why the hell was I asking him about that instead of about the bustlines of his leading ladies, like everyone else did? I sighed and asked him about the only thing he then seemed interested in discussing.

I continued to hear The Song popping up on cheap videos and radio commercials, and I got the idea that it was from some music library. One can purchase for a modest fee, recordings of royalty-free (or low-royalty) music that can be used freely to score movies or commercials or whatever. The places I heard the song were the kind of venues that would use cheap music libraries…but even assuming I was right about his, there was still no way to identify it.

Then, a year or two ago, I was doing a flurry of radio interviews to promote a book I wrote called Mad Art. In case you're never done one of these, the way it works is that you're home on your own phone, available at the appropriate time. If the interview is at 9:00, someone phones you at 8:55 — usually the show's producer but sometimes it's the on-air host, calling during a commercial break. They greet you, check the pronunciation of your name, and then you're patched into the broadcast. You hear a minute or so of the radio show over the phone and then suddenly, the host is introducing you and asking you the first question and it's up to you to be witty and charming and to mention the book as many times as possible. The spot is always over sooner than you expect and then they thank you and hang up.

So one night, I agree to be on a late night radio show in some other city. I think the show started at 3 AM their time, which was Midnight my time. At 11:55, the producer called and I provided the usual pronunciation guide…and then she said, "We'll be to you in about three minutes. You'll hear us playing a short song to lead into the spot." I said fine and waited…and when the short song began, I couldn't believe it: They were playing me on with The Song! The very song I'd been trying to identify since 1971!

I resisted the temptation to answer the host's first question by saying, "Never mind my stupid book. What's the name of that song you just played and who recorded it and where can I get a copy?" But I didn't. I waited until the spot was over and asked the producer who replied, "I don't know. I'll check and call you back!" Thirty minutes later when she hadn't called back, I called her only to have her say, "I'm sorry…no one here knows. It's on a reel of stuff we use all the time but it's not labelled." I asked her if she could at least make a CD of it for me. She said she would but never did. So close and yet so far.

A few months later, I was telling the story to a friend in the radio business. He said, "You think it's early seventies library music? I have a lot of that stuff. I'll send you some CDs." The next day, he did. He sent me thirty CDs, each with 20-30 music cuts on it.

I got lucky. It was the fifth or sixth song on the first CD I checked. I played it about twenty-seven times and after that, I never had to think about it again.

Okay, so you probably want to know: What was this song and where can I hear it? It's called "Pop March" and it was recorded by Johnny Pearson, about whom I know nothing other than that he recorded a lot of songs of this kind. Not long ago, it was released on a CD called Music For TV Dinners: The Sixties. If you click on that name, you'll be transported to an Amazon page that sells the CD but that's not why I'm providing the link. The page has audio samplers of the tunes on the CD, and you can click on the appropriate one and hear about a minute of "Pop March," which is Track #16. That oughta be enough to (a) cause some of you to go, "Oh, that song!" and/or (b) cause it to run through your head for the next 35 years. If nothing else, you can marvel at how a tune can so perfectly capture the sound of its era. It'll make you want to go watch Laugh-In, protest the Vietnam War and take your Pet Rock for a walk. (And if anyone reading this has any info on the song or Johnny Pearson, please share.)

Tom Lehrer wrote and recorded a number of very brilliant comedy songs but he has made his primary living as a professor of mathematics. Sometimes, he combines his two careers. Here's a link to a 13 minute homemade video of Mr. Lehrer singing a number of song parodies that relate to his academic side. You may not get all the references but how often do you get to see and hear Tom Lehrer at all, let alone performing material you've never heard before?

I'm a little weary of Michael Jackson jokes but if anyone can keep it funny, it's Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

Coming up this week on GSN's reruns of What's My Line?: Tomorrow morning is an episode from 3/10/57 with Mystery Guest Charles Boyer. Monday morning, they have Norman Vincent Peale and Judy Holliday, with Robert Preston on the panel.

Tuesday morning, the Mystery Guest is Mamie Van Doren and one of the non-celeb guests is a 27 year old District Attorney named Thomas Eagleton. Fifteen years later, Eagleton would be the Senator from Missouri who ran for vice-president with George McGovern. He was forced to drop off the ticket when some of his health problems were revealed.

Rounding out the week: Wednesday morn, the Mystery Guest is Hedy Lamarr. Thursday, it's Fernando Lamas. And Friday, we get Helen Hayes.

Also, tomorrow morning GSN will run a tribute to Anne Bancroft consisting of one episode of Password and three of What's My Line? Details are right here.