Monthly Archives: September 2005

A few folks have sent me additional thoughts about the Comic-Con International. My pal Earl Kress recently penned this article for the newsletter of the Animation Union and I believe it speaks for a lot of folks. I'll post a few more over the next few days.

A couple of folks have reminded me of one other TV show Don Adams did. From '85 to '88, he starred in a sitcom done in Toronto for Canadian TV with limited distribution in the United States. It was called Check It Out! and in it, he played the manager of a supermarket. It was based on a British TV show called Tripper's Day. Now that others mention it, I vaguely remember seeing an episode or two.

Veteran Hollywood reporter Bob Thomas has written an excellent obit on Don Adams for the Associated Press, hitting all the key points. One biggie, which others are omitting, is the extent to which Adams' career was molded by Bill "Jose Jiminez" Dana, who wrote a lot of Don's early monologues and routines which set his on-screen character and even introduced many of his catch-phrases. Then in 1963, Adams played a bumbling house detective on The Bill Dana Show, a short-lived sitcom set in a hotel, and there was an obvious direct line from that character to Maxwell Smart two years later. Get Smart was not created with him in mind but he was such a perfect fit that everyone assumed otherwise.

Adams was a good comic actor when the material was tailored to the one thing he did well. He made Get Smart work and even members of the crew who detested him personally (there were some) admitted that he could wring every laugh possible out of a joke. After Get Smart though, he appeared in one hastily-cancelled series (The Partners in '71) and an awful lot of unsold pilots. The problem was evident, at least to me as a viewer, around '76 when he starred in a sitcom pilot called Three Times Daley that should have/could have become a series. All it really needed was someone else in the lead role besides Don Adams. It was about three generations — grandfather, father and son — trying to live together in the same house. Adams played the father and he was absolutely blown off the stage by a great character actor named Liam Dunn, who played Grandpa. The trouble was that Adams's part was written for a real human being and he was still playing Maxwell Smart. That was about all he could play. It is not a coincidence that Don's only other successful jobs were voicing cartoon characters — Tennessee Tuxedo and Inspector Gadget. A penguin and a robot…never a human being with any feelings.

He had one other series which almost no one remembers and which is not in any of the obits I've seen. In the early seventies, Adams made the rounds of talk shows and often brought out-takes from Get Smart, mostly of him and Don Rickles. They were hilarious and the reception gave him the idea to do a whole series showing out-takes…or bloopers, as they're sometimes called in a quasi-trademarked way. When he tried to put it together, he discovered that the union contracts made it prohibitive; that he'd have to pay or negotiate with dozens of people for each 30-second clip. In fact, the Screen Actors Guild told him that he technically shouldn't have been airing the Get Smart footage without paying actors, directors, writers, etc. Years later, the union rules were changed in a way that made the Dick Clark "Bloopers" shows do-able but at the time, it killed Adams's plan. Trying to figure out a way around it, he came up with the only possible solution: Create new out-takes just for the show! So in 1975, he hosted Don Adams' Screen Test, a kind of talent competition where the idea was to get aspiring actors, pair them in scenes with established stars and then have a lot of things go wrong. It didn't last long because, I suspect, the out-takes just didn't seem real. Which they weren't.

After that and a few more failed pilots, it was mostly Get Smart revivals, commercials and cartoons and the occasional Love Boat voyage for Mr. Adams. The one time I actually spoke to him for any length of time was at the Playboy Mansion, where he seemed to be in semi-permanent residence. We were both Waiting for Hef, which is pretty much the main thing one does at the Playboy Mansion despite what you may have imagined. I had an appointment to discuss a sketch Hefner was going to do on a show I'd written. Adams had just dropped in because he needed to talk with The Man about his marital problems and he seemed so worried, I almost felt like I should offer to let him go ahead of me.

We talked about what I thought was his best comedy album, Don Adams Meets the Roving Reporter, which I don't believe has ever made it as far as CD. We talked about his appearances on The Steve Allen Show where he repeatedly did a sketch playing a lawyer in a courtroom summation scene. ("Your honor, for the last thirty minutes, I have sat and watched as my worthy opponent, the District Attorney, has stood up here and made a complete jackass of himself. Now, it's my turn.") We talked about The Bill Dana Show and about Tennessee Tuxedo and about his brother (a fine character actor named Dick Yarmy) and I think he liked the fact that I never asked him anything about Get Smart. I base that on the fact that someone else later walked into the room and immediately began peppering him with lines from the show and questions about 99's real name and what kind of car he drove in the opening. Adams smiled in that polite, "I have to go through this all the time" way.

Hef finally appeared — pajama-clad, of course — and hurried through his meeting with me so he could get to Don. The last thing Mr. Adams said to me as I was going out and he was coming in was, "Thanks for taking my mind off the end of my marriage."

Fifteen years later, I found myself around him at an autograph show. He was not well — didn't look well, didn't seem to remember a lot and didn't even sound much like Don Adams, the easiest person in the world to impersonate. At one point when he seemed somewhat aware, I said something to him that began with, "You won't remember this, but…" It turned out he didn't remember at all when we'd sat and talked for what must have been at least an hour. Trying to jog his memory a bit, I said, "You were there for some advice from Hefner because your marriage was breaking up."

He paused, thought for a moment and said, "You wouldn't happen to know which wife this was, would you?" I'm pretty sure he meant it as a joke. Even if he didn't, the delivery was vintage Maxwell Smart and comedically perfect.

To the surprise of no one who'd seen him the last few years, Don Adams has passed away. I have to run out to a lunch meeting but I'll write something later today. And I promise: No "Would you believe…" jokes.

Over in Slate, Edward Jay Epstein offers an overview of the escalating war between Comcast Cable and DirecTV. The article is okay as far as it goes but I think this is one of those "Battle of the Titans," so familiar to readers of Marvel Comics, wherein two powerful forces slug it out based on a false premise. For instance, I don't think "Video on Demand" will ultimately be driven by allowing people to pay to see Desperate Housewives whenever they want and without commercials, nor do I think it will thrive by delivering current major motion pictures. I think most people will come to adopt the attitude that the big, mainstream material will always be readily available. If you don't catch it today, you can always wait for a rerun, especially if you have a TiVo or similar device and know how to program it.

Epstein writes of the head of Comcast, "His ultimate VOD goal is to release new movies at the same time as they are released on DVD." I dunno…if you're going to pay to see a new movie, wouldn't you rather have the DVD? Even if it means waiting until your next trip to Costco… when it'll probably be cheaper? Once you have physical possession of the DVD, you really "own" that movie. It's not going to get deleted off the hard drive of your Personal Video Recorder or lost if there's a crash. You can watch it whenever you want it on any TV in your house that has a DVD player. You can take it to a friend's house and watch it there. You can look at a little shelf of DVDs in your library and say, "I own those" and feel like you really got something for your money. This could get into a long discourse but basically, I think the new age of cable and the Internet is disabusing people of the idea that you pay for content. A lot of people feel that they're not stealing if they download a bootleg of a new movie. They'd never think of stealing a DVD or a VHS tape of that film but just moving a copy to their harddisk is different. That same, dubious distinction is what I think will discourage people from paying to have a new movie delivered to their PVRs when they could be getting a tangible DVD for their bucks.

What I think VOD is going to have to do is to offer people programming they can't go and buy at Sam's Club. I'll pay to add new channels to my DirecTV subscription because that increases my viewing choices. But I've never bought a pay-per-view offering because I've never seen an ad for one it would bother me to miss. If I cared about sports, that would probably be different.

The business model for VOD may not be in TV. It may be established by Howard Stern's pending move to Sirius Radio: How many people will buy the units and subscribe to hear Howard, for the first time, unexpurgated? (My guess: Not nearly as many as Sirius is projecting. I think a lot of people will never accept the idea of paying for radio. And as Stern's show gets dirtier, it's going to be more frustrating to listen to it and not be able to see. Betcha that within three years, he moves the whole thing to HBO or Showtime…or to VOD, where it would indeed be something you couldn't get elsewhere or buy at Sam's Club.)

Lastly, Epstein's article is wrong that "[Rupert] Murdoch's satellites reach about 90 percent of the American population. Everyone (including Roberts' cable subscribers) in this vast footprint can receive Murdoch's 500 channels with a small 31-inch dish and digital receiver." An awful lot of people can't because they live in apartment buildings and housing projects that won't let them put up dishes and/or where they have no unobstructed view to the South. (I had to have someone come out and cut the top off a big tree in my neighbor's yard with his permission.) Another large chunk of people in that 90% are simply scared of the technology. To my mother, having cable installed wasn't that much different from using the old roof antenna that had brought her TV for years. Ask her about having a "satellite dish" on her house and she won't get past the idea that this is something that you have to work for NASA to operate. I love DirecTV but it'll never be as popular as cable because it'll never be as simple.

And this morning, I received the following from Julio Diaz…

Of course, the flip side of your discussion about the San Diego Con is that Angelenos such as Foster complaining about the struggle of attending sounds like a bunch of sour grapes to those of us who live in other parts of the world and who have dreamed about attending the Con for decades. I've lived my whole life in Florida, and am only planning on attending my first San Diego Con in 2006, having wanted to go for basically my entire life (I'm only 33, so by the time I was aware of such things, San Diego was already legendary). I've never been able to afford the investment involved in attending, including airfare and hotel. In fact, I'd likely not be able to go in '06, either, had I not just sold my house, having transferred to another part of Florida for work. And even then, I'll be rooming with several friends and likely sleeping on a floor for the week. To those of us for whom San Diego has taken on a mythic, Mecca-like quality, who have for years and years dreamed of going and who have thought of the Con as the fandom equivalent of nirvana, well…

We'd be thrilled if it was just a short drive on a crowded freeway.

Just my two cents. I'm sure looking forward to being there in '06!

And you'll enjoy it, I'm sure, but only if you attend all my panels. It's really quite an amazing convergence, though my friend is right: It does require more effort than we might like. I've found over the years that certain kinds of travelling — going to New York, for instance — simply necessitate a fair amount of advance planning and research. You can't just up and go to the San Diego Con. You have to book your room at the earliest opportunity. You have to figure out when you're going and where you're eating and I think it's almost mandatory to make out a little schedule of events you'll catch and where and when you'll meet up with friends. One of the reasons I enjoy moderating so many panels is that I like always knowing where I'm going to be at any given time. I feel very lost in that place when I'm just wandering for any length of time with no particular destination or goal.

I find it helpful, in explaining the con to new attendees, to make the point that it is many conventions in one. You pretty much have to find the part of it that interests you. The great thing is that it's there, somewhere. You just have to get past the freeway and hotel obstacles.

My longtime friend, cartoonist Bob Foster, just sent me the following…

Every time you discuss the S.D. Con, I get another twinge of annoyance. I didn't go this year, for the first time since #2. I just couldn't face the miserable freeway drive to and fro, the agony of hoping to find a room, the aggravation of playing slow motion football with 100,000 attendees and the concentration of so many people, vehicles, superheroes and tourists all in one three-block corner of San Diego. Unless they spread events around the whole city, utilize other facilities (like the old convention center or all those vast meeting rooms in all those other hotels all over town) I probably won't be going back. It's just too much of a pain in the ass. I'd be curious to know how many of your readers feel the same way.

Well, the miserable freeway drive from L.A. to San Diego is what it is. The convention committee can't do much to change that, and I suggest you consider the train or driving at a non-peak hour. Actually, Sergio and I had a pretty unmiserable drive down this year on a Wednesday afternoon, thanks in part to a shortcut. And it wasn't all that bad on the way back on Sunday evening, either. (One year, I had to drive back in the middle of the night. I left San Diego around four in the morning and did 80 MPH most of the way — with cars passing me. Much to my amazement, I got back to Los Angeles in the two hours that Mapquest claims the drive should routinely take…and that included a drive-thru detour involving a Fatburger.)

I suspect spreading the con out over the city wouldn't work, even if those facilities are available. A lot of the hotels there weren't designed with big meeting rooms because they figured that's what the convention center is for. But if the con sprawled all over San Diego, my guess is that 99% of all attendees would still spend the entire con in the big building because that's where the epicenter of the convention is. And if you told them there were great events across town in the old convention center, they'd say, "Great, but there's more than enough for us to see and do here, and who wants to hassle with traffic and parking and going somewhere else?"

I'm sure most attendees wish the con was less crowded, that it was easier to find lodging, etc. — and by the way, what you're suggesting wouldn't make hotel rooms any more plentiful. It would probably make them more difficult to secure if all the folks like you, who stay away because of the crowds, decided it was now safe to attend. But the con has become what it's become, and I long ago had to accept that this convention I've attended since the very first one was no longer the intimate gathering it was back at the El Cortez. There are other conventions that can give you a less congested experience — the WonderCon in San Francisco and the Mid-Ohio Con in Columbus, to name two. The size and scope of the Comic-Con International have become a part of its unique nature and I don't think it's going to change.

If I'd been in New York last week, I'd have gone to see Kitty Carlisle Hart, who was performing at Feinstein's. 95 years old and still singing and telling stories about hanging around with George Gershwin. She was married to one of my favorite theatrical figures, Moss Hart, who was a giant even before he directed My Fair Lady. What an amazing lady.

It dawns on me that I have a thought that combines the previous two postings — the one about gas prices and the one about people driving to the San Diego Con instead of getting a room. It occurred a bit more than 30 years ago, back when that annual event was called the San Diego Comic Book Convention…or maybe it was still the Golden State Comic Convention. It's changed official names a few times and no one ever really paid attention. It was always just "The San Diego Con" to all.

I had a friend named Bob who was about my age. I was around 22 then. Bob lived here in Los Angeles with his parents. That year, we all decided to attend the S.D. Con and all of us secured rooms in the convention hotel…all but Bob. He declared that we were saps; that he'd done the math and decided it was cheaper to drive down each day than to get a room.

Some figures. The convention was three days then. The rooms were around $18 a night plus tax. Gas was 40 cents a gallon. San Diego was just as far away as it is now, which is around 130 miles. So figure 260 round-trip. Bob was going to drive 780 miles in three days. His car got around 20 miles to the gallon on freeways so…hold on while I call up the calculator. (Before computers, I used to be able to do this kind of thing in my head.)

Okay. Three nights at the hotel was around $60. Driving to and fro cost him about sixteen dollars, plus I think he also figured in what he was saving by eating breakfast and dinner at home. On the other hand, he had to get up each morning at 6 AM, leave the house by 7:00, get to San Diego around 10:00 and then leave again by six or so. Since some of the best portions of the con are in the evening, he was spending 5-6 hours a day on the San Diego Freeway and foregoing about half the convention to save fifteen or sixteen dollars a day.

We mocked Bob for this. Even the cheapest of us — and you know how cheap comic fans can be — thought this was a silly way to save money. (And by the way, he wasn't doing this because he didn't have the loot. During the con, he spent a few hundred bucks on old issues of Captain Marvel, his main passion of the time.) His friends all ridiculed Bob relentlessly for what he was willing to do to save $44.

But I got to thinking: Let's say your car gets around 20 miles to the gallon. Gas was $3.07 a gallon when I filled it up last week. It'll probably be well over four bucks, maybe five by the next Comic-Con International. Let's say it's $4.25. Driving to and from San Diego will therefore cost around sixty dollars. The convention is four days and therefore four nights, and rooms will run around $200 a night. So if one drives back and forth instead of staying down there, an Angeleno could save $740.

Maybe Bob was on to something…

In the last week, I've received a number of e-mails asking if I have any inside info on a rumor that the Comic-Con International is soon to relocate from its native San Diego. Yes, I have inside info. It ain't true.

It is conceivable that the day might come when some other town will be a better fit for the nation's largest gathering of people like you and me. It is also within the realm of human possibility that the civic leaders of San Diego — the ones who run the convention center and arrange deals for big assemblages to assemble therein — will dictate unacceptable terms. That's why the Comic-Con organizers need to always keep their options open and to explore alternatives.

But frankly, I can't think of another town that would work for the event. There's a huge Los Angeles convention center and another in Anaheim but both are vast, impersonal spaces in which you'd never find your way to, say, my panels. Either would make for a very different kind of convention. Housing would be harder to secure and farther from the con, and I suspect most Southern Californians would commute each day rather than pay for a room. That would, in turn, have a major impact on the convention itself. One of the things that makes a convention of that size economically feasible is that so many people spend so much money at local hotels and restaurants as a direct result of the con. (If they tried to relocate to Anaheim and kept the con in July or August, we'd be fighting for hotel space and intermingling with folks attending Disneyland during its peak season.)

The convention is well-run and if it was forced to move, I'm sure they'd figure something out. But it may never come to that and it certainly won't in the foreseeable future. So ignore the rumors. The con is staying in the 619 area code for now. Even if that means some of us have to park in 714.

Bill Clinton spent a goodly portion of his run-up to the presidency attacking Big Tobacco, and pledging to raise taxes on cigarettes, and America liked that because we all know Cigarette Companies are evil. It occurs to me that a Democratic candidate today could get a lot of similar traction running against Big Oil, and not by raising those taxes but by limiting profits and lowering prices. I don't know the precise wording but some sort of caps on what can be charged at the pump and how much Shell can gross would sit well with a lot of voters including, if certain polls are to believed, a lot of Republicans. I'm not sure I believe this survey which says that nine out of ten Americans believe that high gas prices are merely a matter of the oil companies gouging us for sheer profit. But the number's probably close to that and we don't even have any prominent figures making that case in public yet. America has come to that view on its own.

Suppose the Democrats made that a major theme of the 2006 election: "It's time to stop the oil companies from soaking us just because they can." Would this be unpopular with the electorate? More to the point, would the Republican party be credible in saying, "We'll handle that"? They can't even blame it on the war because it's their war, and America's becoming disenchanted with it, too. I think Republicans would be stuck. They probably couldn't even get George W. Bush to pledge not to veto any legislation that prevented companies from raising prices whenever they feel like it. It is said that ExxonMobil is now the most profitable company in the history of mankind, with profits of $110 million per day. Keep that in mind the next time you pay $3.09 a gallon for Super Unleaded. It's not because of Iraq or 9/11 and it won't be just because of Katrina or Rita, either. They're raising prices because they can, the same way you'd make your employer pay you twice as much if you thought he had no choice but to comply.

A small group would scream that it's Socialist to prevent anyone from earning as much money as possible. I don't think most Americans buy that premise when there's no reasonable alternative and we're all chipping in to make millionaires into billionaires. I'm not even saying there aren't drawbacks and dangers to the government freezing or otherwise limiting the profits in any industry. I just think that it's sounding more and more like an issue where the Republicans couldn't compete with Democrats on Election Day.

But don't worry if you think it's a bad idea. It's not like the Democrats will do anything with it.

Andrew Sullivan, who is arguably a Conservative, discusses why inarguable Conservatives are unhappy with George W. Bush.

Okay, let's imagine you have some friends that you don't really like that much. Let's imagine they have a small child. Let's imagine you have to go to their house and it seems appropriate for you to take a gift to that small child.

You want to give the kid something that will really annoy the parents to the point where they'll rip handfuls of hair from their skulls and run screaming into the street. What do you do?

You give the child one of these. To get the full effect, click the button that says "See it in action."

Tommy Bond, who played the bully in 18 "Our Gang" comedies and later was the first screen Jimmy Olsen, has died at the age of 79. Tommy was five years old when he was discovered and cast in Hal Roach's kid gang comedies. He played a few small roles in the films in 1931, then was dropped from the cast. Later, he was brought back and cast as Butch, the little tough kid who was always looking for an opportunity to beat up Alfalfa or otherwise cause trouble. He outgrew the role but went on to do parts in other films, and even did some animation voice work. (He was the little owl in the Warner Brothers cartoon, I Love to Singa.)

Tommy worked a lot throughout the forties, including playing Olsen in two Columbia movie serials of Superman which starred Kirk Alyn as the Man of Steel — Superman (1948) and Atom Man Vs. Superman (1950). In 1951, he gave up acting for production work and behind-the-scene jobs, a decision which caused him to turn down the role of Jimmy Olsen on the Superman TV series. The part went instead to Jack Larsen.

In his later years, Tommy became a fixture at autograph shows and film societies where he happily signed photos and copies of his autobiography, Darn Right, It's Butch. I enjoyed talking with him about his career and hearing his observations on how the business had changed. Needless to say, he thought it had changed a lot. Here's a link to the Associated Press obit.

A few years ago, I met a gentleman who was a high-level exec at one of the big Las Vegas hotel empires. He was an interesting guy who, in the half-hour or so that we were together, never allowed the conversation to stray far from his thesis, which I will now attempt to summarize. It was that Las Vegas was The Entertainment Capital of the World and that it will become only more so. Vegas, and especially the hotel company that employed him, would eventually steal away every important entertainment event in the world. Every major concert would be in Vegas. Every major TV show would film or tape in Vegas. The days of touring, he said, would be over. If Springsteen or the Stones decided to tour for a year, for example, some L.V. venue would instead make them an offer they couldn't refuse to just play Vegas for that year.

He even had this odd idea that Vegas could usurp the Times Square tradition of New Year's Eve. He said, approximately, "We will stage such incredible events here on that night that the world will no longer care what's going on in New York on New Year's Eve. They will tune in to watch what's happening in Vegas." (This was just after New Year's Day of 1997 when, as I wrote here, they blew up one of the Vegas hotels.) Inasmuch as it's my mission in life to forever point out The Obvious, I mentioned to the man that no matter what they do in Vegas, New York will always enjoy an insurmountable advantage. The New Year arrives three hours earlier in that time zone.

The man looked at me in a way that suggested that in all their meetings and planning sessions, no one had ever thought of that. And then he paused for a moment, and I could swear he was thinking, "There must be some way to change that…"

In the eight years since that conversation, Vegas seems to have abandoned any attempts to outdo Times Square in the category of New Year's Eve celebrations. Instead, they've gone after their theater. Avenue Q is the featured attraction at the new Wynn Las Vegas hotel and another theater is currently being designed to house a long run of Spamalot. Rumor has it that Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick have turned down a staggering pile of cash to do another year of The Producers in the gambling mecca, and that other huge money offers are looming. The idea here is not merely to import road companies of New York shows — Vegas has done that for years — but to start funding new shows by major Broadway producers. The costs of mounting a new show in Manhattan are huge and some of the Vegas entrepreneurs think they can make their city more appealing. The goal is to make it as important and valid for a show to open on The Strip as it is to open on The Great White Way. I don't know if they can pull that off but they're sure gonna try.

In the meantime, some Vegas promoters have set their sights on another city's entertainment success. A group there is about to present a plan to the city of New Orleans to rent Mardi Gras to Vegas for the next few years. The premise is that it'll be a while before the Louisiana city is in any condition to stage the annual festival…so they'll hold it in Las Vegas and at the same time, raise money to help rebuild New Orleans. It sounds like someone is a little too eager to capitalize on a tragedy…but if they can make the math work, it might not be a bad idea.