Monthly Archives: November 2005

This article in the L.A. Times says that the TV and motion picture producers' organization is girding for possible strikes by the Writers Guild and the Screen Actors Guild. The two unions' respective contracts don't expire for quite some time but in both labor organizations, officers are being elected on militant platforms and in both groups, staff members are being fired who don't seem in tune with that thinking.

The studios are right to be concerned. There's a very bloody battle waiting to happen if they persist in keeping to the old financial model of paying writers and actors. The industry's revenue sources are changing and the methods of compensation are going to have to change. The only good sign is that everyone seems to recognize, this far in advance, that a war is inevitable. That may give them enough time to play the games necessary to settle things before they explode. (That's not the best sentence I ever wrote but you know what I mean to say…)

Whenever I have been with Jonathan Winters, it's been the same: Everyone around stops and tells him, "You are the funniest man who ever lived." Sometimes, they go on and on about how often they've played his albums, how much they loved him in this or that movie or on some TV show. Often, unaware of the insensitivity in their questions, they ask him why he isn't on TV more often and/or how he feels about so many other performers — Robin Williams, especially — borrowing material from the fertile Winters imagination.

It is also not uncommon for people to try and coax him into a little improvisation, throwing some question at him that just might provoke him to lapse into character. Depending on his mood, Jonathan may or may not comply. I once stood on Cahuenga Boulevard for twenty minutes and watched him turn into an ambassador from some nation with indeterminate dialects, spewing paranoid fantasies about other countries, their ambassadors and, for some reason, the ambassadors' house pets. It was as funny as anything I ever heard on TV, only I didn't hear it on TV. I heard it on Cahuenga, in front of a French restaurant.

Mr. Winters is not the only human being I've been around who is incessantly called the funniest comedian ever. When I worked with Sid Caesar, everyone who passed would stop and tell him the same thing. I've always wondered how it was on the set of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World with not just the funniest man in the world but two of them. (And they also had Buster Keaton and a few other contenders around…)

Still, Jonathan is one of a kind. In a lifetime of talking comedy and comedians, I have never encountered anyone who mentioned his name and was not in awe of his mind, his characterizations, his sheer ability to pull funny out of thin air. The talent is truly organic. You could quote most comics' acts and get at least some of the laughs. With Winters, you have to be there. It's only wonderful when he says it and often, only when he says it.

He's eighty years old today. Here's hoping he and Sid both go on being the Funniest Man Alive for a long time.

Some PBS outlets are running an hour called Broadway's Best at Pops, which includes clips of Ethel Merman, Ray Bolger, Carol Channing and Ben Vereen performing with the Boston Pops on past shows. (I guess that last part goes without saying. It's very hard to book Ethel and Ray these days.)

As we all know, late Saturday night/early Sunday morn, NBC runs a complete vintage episode of Saturday Night Live. My TiVo claims the one this weekend is the April 21, 1990 episode hosted by Alec Baldwin with musical guests, the B-52s but NBC press releases say it's the March 12, 1983 show hosted by Bruce Dern with musical guest Leon Redbone. This is the one with the Assassination of Buckwheat, which was among the better things they did that season.

I'm guessing they switched to the 1983 episode because Sunday evening, NBC is running a two-hour special on Saturday Night Live in the eighties. This is preceded by a two-hour Penn and Teller special which I'll also be recording.

I haven't been mentioning the upcoming Mystery Guests on the GSN What's My Line? reruns. But if it matters to you, the next eight shows should be Shelley Winters, Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Jonathan Winters, Bob Cummings, Laurence Harvey, Gertrude Berg and Jimmy Cagney. They're now running shows from March, 1960 so we're starting to hear comments about the presidential election of that year, which makes for an interesting bit of history.

My friend Buzz Dixon, whose name you've seen many a time on this weblog, is a writer of all sorts of things: Screenplays, animation, comics, games, etc. He has recently turned editor/packager with a new line of what his people are calling "America's Premiere Inspirational Manga." Serenity is a comedic teen soap opera about an unhappy girl who finds a happy ending in today's world. She's a lonely teen from a broken family who's coping with certain anger issues as she enrolls in a new school and gets "adopted" by a Christian prayer group. Buzz wrote it and it was drawn primarily by Min Kwon, a young Korean-American woman who's steeped in Asian storytelling techniques yet immersed in American culture as well. I like the fact that the story is written with conviction but without hectoring, and that the kids seem to talk and act like actual kids.

Each bi-monthly paperback edition is issued by Barbour Publishing, a long-time publisher of Christian and inspirational material. You can pick up the first one (and all to come) from Amazon. Here's a link to order. Good luck with this, Buzz.

Disneyland revamping the Pirates of the Carribean ride to bring it more in line with the movie series of the same name? This site says it's so.

A press release from NBC…

NEW YORK – November 10 – "Late Night" host Conan O'Brien and his wife Liza Powel O'Brien are thrilled to announce the arrival of their son, Beckett O'Brien. This is the couple's second child. He was born Wednesday, November 9 in New York City at 8:27 PM. He is a healthy 8lbs 4oz. Mother, baby and father are all well.

The other day, we helped spread the rumor that the Tail o' the Pup, the hot dog stand shaped like a hot dog, may be forced to close soon. This article in the L.A. Times says that its owner is hoping to move it to a new location in Westwood Village. Good news if it happens.

TiVo is rolling out a new software upgrade that made it to one of my machines the other night. It simplifies some menus but the main new feature is something they call Overlap Protection. The message you receive with this doesn't explain it well so I did a little research and I think (note the italics for emphasis) I have it figured out.

First of all, you should know that when TiVo installs this software upgrade, it turns the Overlap Protection feature on. You can turn it off if you like. This is done in the Settings section and the control is on the Recording menu.

If the feature is turned off and you accidentally schedule recordings of two shows that overlap, one will not be recorded. If it's turned on and the shows overlap by six minutes or more, that will still be the case.

But if the shows overlap by five minutes or less, TiVo will record both and merely trim the beginning or ending of one. If you look at your To Do List, a clipped show will be marked with an asterisk.

How does TiVo decide which show to clip and which one to record in whole? If one show is a Season Pass and one is a one-time recording, then the one-time recording will be the one not clipped. If both shows are Season Passes, then the one with the higher priority number on your Season Pass List will be the one not clipped. If both shows are one-time recordings (i.e., neither show is a Season Pass), then the most recently-scheduled one will be the one not clipped. In any case, a TiVo Suggestion will have the lowest standing. It will probably not be recorded at all if there's an overlap but if it is, it will be the one clipped.

There. I think I have that right. Someone tell me if I don't.

In other TiVo News, it is now possible to do an online scheduling via the Yahoo TV Listings page. You'll need to have a Yahoo e-mail and also sign up for online scheduling over at the TiVo site. Once you do, it makes things very easy, especially if your TiVo is connected to the Internet so it can receive the data quickly. We like this a lot.

Lastly: TiVo has started a new promotion on its site where you can get a 40-hour TiVo for free if you sign up for a full year of TiVo service and pay a slightly higher subscription fee for the first year — $16.95 a month as opposed to $12.95. That comes to $203.40 for the box and Year One of its usage and then, I assume, they let you go down to the lower subscription price. The standard best deal for a 40-hour TiVo is $49.99 for the machine and then the first year is $155.40 –which equals $205.39. So it's not much of a savings, though it may be greater because I think you have to pay sales tax on the latter deal and don't on the new one. Still, you may not want to avail yourself of the "free machine" offer because a 40-hour TiVo may be too small for you. I bought an 80-hour TiVo for my office and a few years later, I took it in to these people and had its hard disk replaced with two that jointly give me 317 hours at Basic Quality or 142 at High Quality. I record most things at High Quality though I always have the fear that my TiVo is going to look at what I watch and tell me, "Sorry, you can't record a low quality show at High Quality."

Michael Hiltzik, who blogs for the L.A. Times, has a view of Arnold Schwarzenegger that I find interesting. It includes the prediction that Arnold will not stand for re-election; that he will find some excuse to go do other things. Having predicted that Schwarzenegger would not run in the first place, I'm not about to venture another Arnold projection. But you might want to read Hiltzik's take.

The taping of tonight's Late Night with Conan O'Brien was cancelled and a rerun will be on in place of the scheduled new episode. Could this mean that Mr. O'Brien's spouse is delivering their second baby?

Gee, I wish I knew some ways to be annoying when playing Monopoly.

In the spirit of "If you can't beat 'em…", comedian Lewis Black will be appearing this evening on The Weather Channel to try his hand at forecasting and to (perhaps) explain why he's spent years calling it "a worthless channel." This will allegedly occur shortly after 9PM Eastern time and again shortly after Midnight. I'm not sure if the later segment is a replay of the earlier material. Whatever it is, it was taped on Monday so Mr. Black's predictions will have a dubious legitimacy.

The trouble with these special elections is that they combine precincts so your polling place can wind up being quite some distance. Mine was and for some reason, I decided to walk to it. Went right through the ballot in about twelve seconds and I felt like I wanted to ask the workers there, "Hey, you got anything else I can vote on? I came a long way to get here."

Only early this morning did the two main weather models for Southern California finally come into agreement. Last night, the NAM was still forecasting a big Tuesday storm and the GFS was predicting minor rain chances through Friday. They finally split the difference and now foresee a big storm on Wednesday (though not as big as the NAM was anticipating) tapering off on Thursday.

Or at least, that's what the weather folks are saying at the moment. This is a cut-off low (i.e., "weatherman's woe") so any forecast has to be qualified with the reminder that these things are hard to gauge and that plans can change rapidly. Keep the umbrella handy.

Harper's Magazine has an interesting article up: A History of the Iraq War Told Entirely In Lies.

(For what it's worth, for reasons I'll explain at greater length here one of these days, I am not comfortable with the use of the word "lie" to describe any statement that eventually turns out to be untrue. "Lie" connotes deliberate deception and I suspect that some or all of the false assertions and reports fall into the slightly different categories of exaggeration, selective reporting, believing stuff that more competent people would have known was bogus, and encouraging others to tell you what you want to hear. None of this is wholly forgiveable, especially when it amounts to passing the buck to unnamed others who also will not be held accountable. But it's not all a matter of "lies.")

Also, over in The New Yorker, this article by Jane Mayer discusses CIA interrogation that turns into arguable murder.