Monthly Archives: June 2006

News from the world of show business falls into two categories. Some new projects are announced because they're actually about to happen. Others are publicized because they aren't. The people behind them have some of the elements necessary to make their new endeavor a reality but not all of them. They're lacking financing or a star or distribution or something…and they hope that the announcement will cause the missing piece(s) to materialize. If you look back at an old Variety, you'll see items about movies that are about to start shooting or which were "already in production" but never, in fact, went in front of any camera…or TV shows that were "a definite go" and which were never heard of again. These are the "partway-there" projects that were presented as if actually happening by someone hoping to find whatever was necessary to make them actually happen.

It's sometimes easy to tell the real announcements from the hopeful ones, sometimes hard. And of course, there are projects in the second category that do eventually manage to become real…but they weren't at the time they were announced. To survive in and around this business, you have to develop a decent sense of what's definite and what's wishful. I've had pretty good luck turning down involvement in things that weren't going to happen. That's because I follow an old Show Biz maxim that I made up: If it's at all doubtful, it's highly doubtful.

Today, it was announced that a musical comedy version of the Jerry Lewis movie, The Nutty Professor, is "heading for Broadway" with Jer himself directing. Here's the announcement and I'm putting this one in the "wishful" category. It's actually not a bad idea at all for a musical but look at where they are. They have no composer or lyricist. Those are not minor details when you're putting on a musical. They also aren't announcing the name of the book writer(s) yet, which does not suggest Mr. Lewis is working with anyone with any experience at all in doing a musical. They hope to do a tryout at the Old Globe in San Diego in 2007 but apparently, no one's bothered to tell the Old Globe about this. It's a little late to be booking for '07, plus a brand-new musical by new people will probably need more outta-town tryouts than a few weeks in San Diego before it'll be Manhattan-ready.

If this show is ever going to happen — and I'm not saying it can't — it's going to have to take on some heavyweight investors and some producers and other behind-the-scenes people with Broadway chops. Since it seems to have neither yet, I'd say the announcement is intended to perhaps shake some loose, get some interested. It will especially need a director who's done this kind of thing before. Mel Brooks did not direct the stage version of The Producers, after all, and he had more stage experience than Jerry Lewis.

Let's watch how this one develops. It just might…but it's got a long way to go before it gets anywhere near the Great White Way.

Here's a connection to the entire Bill Bennett interview on The Daily Show. I don't like Bennett very much. He's always struck me as a guy who can gin up moral outrage over anything sexual and/or done by minorities or poor people…but apart from the occasional token reference, he seems incapable of seeing anything wrong in anything upper class people do to make money. When the Enron scandal broke, I saw him cornered into talking about it and he seemed to have to force himself through clenched teeth to say there was anything immoral about swindling employees out of their pensions.

I happen to think legal gay marriage is inevitable in this country. It may take quite a while to go nationwide and it may be called something other than "marriage" here and there for a while. But I think Jon Stewart is right in his comments that this kind of thing only evolves in one direction. What's more, I think men like Bennett and Jerry Falwell know that it's inevitable. They just want to see what they can get for themselves in terms of cash and power by manipulating one segment of the population before this particular "hot button" goes cold.

It's another nugget from Your Show of Shows. This one features Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner and Howie Morris as The Haircuts, a musical group they occasionally played on the series. The Haircuts were pretty popular for about an hour there and actually released a record or two. The clip's a little under six minutes and it demonstrates how the three of them could not only do dialect and talk funny but also move funny. Their songs were written primarily by Head Writer Mel Tolkin, who later claimed he penned most of them in under three minutes. Their moves were perfected by watching kinescopes of "real" groups, especially The Crewcuts, from whence they got their name. Enjoy.

A funny online chat with my favorite standup comedian, Lewis Black. It's on the Washington Post site so you may have to register. Thanks to Bruce Reznick for letting me know about it.

Funniest thing I've seen in days: The last half of Stephen Colbert's interview with Stone Phillips. Here's a link and I'll warn you it's a link to Comedy Central's website where such things don't always work. But if it does, you'll enjoy it.

Jerry Beck is very happy — and I know Jerry so I know how happy — to announce that the hurdles have been cleared: Popeye is coming to home video. Eventually, just about everything will be on DVD but it's always nice when something really good gets there. Here's the full press release.

Okay, I rewatched the Daily Show segment with Jon Stewart hammering Bill Bennett and I see that I misunderstood: Stewart did not say Bennett would be on the following broadcast, as well. What he did was tell Bennett, "We're going to split this into segments…and you'll be the whole back end of the show." He did not mean the interview was being divided over two programs. He meant it would be edited so it could run two segments in that night's show.

What I think happened was this: The show has three acts. I believe they taped comedy spots for the first two acts and then the Bennett interview was supposed to just be Act Three. During it, Stewart and/or his producers apparently made the decision that it deserved more time so they let it run long enough to fill two acts. Then they went back afterwards and taped Stewart welcoming us back from commercial. Afterwards, they dropped out whatever they'd taped for Act Two and positioned the Bennett interview as Acts Two and Three, using that "welcome back" to get us back into the interview at the top of Act Three. That caused the awkward edit right after the "welcome back," and I think there was another jump cut in there, probably also because they were reconfiguring one segment to span two.

It was an interesting interview, in part because Bennett's a smart man and he knew he was losing badly. You can see portions of it over here.

This one will take a little more than seven minutes of your life but it's worth it. It's a sketch from the old Your Show of Shows starring Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howie Morris. They don't make 'em like this anymore…

A lot of folks — friends and total strangers alike — seem to want periodic reports on how I'm doing since Gastric Bypass surgery. I'm doing great…that's how I'm doing. It's been eleven days and I've lost two pounds a day with amazingly little discomfort. I really don't want to become a walking commercial for this procedure so let me state that my comments apply only to my experiences and may not be typical. I'm still on liquids, ingesting a calorie count that would starve a supermodel…but I'm not hungry. In fact, tonight I had dinner in my favorite Chinese restaurant with a friend of mine and while he gorged on an entree that I would have loved twelve days ago, I was quite content to sit there and sip broth. I'll be segueing to semi-solid foods around the end of this week but I'm in no great hurry to get there.

Twenty-two pounds is not a huge deal. I've lost these pounds before…several times, in fact. But somehow, it never felt this good before to be rid of them. Aches that I had accepted as permanent parts of my life have gone away and I can feel others starting to fade. At the moment, I'm wearing a pair of pants I haven't been in for at least two years. (Fortunately, I saved a lot of the clothes I outgrew on the way up. I expect to be working my way back through my wardrobe for a few months.) My primary physician gave me the once-over on Monday and said things could not be going better.

I may set up a separate page here for those who are interested in the topic but for now, I just wanted to answer lots of e-mails at once and say I'm doing fine. It's all very new and yet it feels a lot more normal that I would have expected. I'll write more about the experience as I gain a bit more perspective on it.

Anyone here see tonight's Daily Show With Jon Stewart? Stewart got into the topic of gay marriage with Bill Bennett. It's very difficult for anyone debating the host of a show to win or even tie. The host has home court advantage and he's the one who frames the discussion. If you go on The Daily Show, you also have to cope with the studio audience (naturally on Stewart's side) and the fact that the host is probably a lot quicker and funnier than you are. Still, Mr. Bennett lost the debate by a pretty wide margin…at least in the show as aired. It looked to me like there were at least two edits in the discussion — something I've never seen The Daily Show do before — and then Stewart said they'd tape more with Bennett and air more interview with him tomorrow.

[UPDATE, ADDED LATER: I've changed my mind about what happened. See this later message for the new theory.]

Following up on our earlier item about Bob Kane (or one of his ghosts) swiping on early Batman stories, a couple of message boards — this one, for instance — are discussing to what extent Mr. Kane could draw at all. It's no secret that after about 1946, everything published in comics under his signature was done by someone else. He may occasionally have drawn or redrawn a panel here or there but it was all substantially the work of men like Lew Sayre Schwartz or Sheldon Moldoff.

Kane also employed ghost artists on at least some of what he "drew" for other venues. During the "pop art" craze of the sixties, which I believe lasted about an hour and forty-two minutes, he suddenly was out selling oil paintings that he'd allegedly done, blowing up old Batman panels a la Roy Lichtenstein. Soon after, he was sued by a lady who claimed she'd actually painted them…meaning that Kane hadn't even taken the time to project, trace and color in the panels — something a high school art student could have done.

But was it that Kane couldn't do the work or that he just didn't want to expend the effort? There's a big difference there. Based on my own encounters with the man, I'd say it was both with the emphasis on laziness. Once upon a time, the man did support himself as an artist in comics. He wasn't great but back then, not many were. What separated Kane from many others was that he seemed to figure out that drawing comics day and night only led to drawing more comics day and night.

You couldn't get wealthy that way (Jack Kirby sure didn't) and even if you could, some people just don't want to spend 80 hours out of every week at a drawing table. To become something more than a comic artist required better drawing than Kane could muster so he hired assistants, all of whom drew better than he did, and let them make him look good. It worked pretty well, at least as far as he was concerned…and then later on, he figured out that he could do as many syndicated comic strip artists did, which was to go out and play and let the hired help put in the 80 hours.

I first met Kane in 1968 when I was fourteen years old. The story is told in my book, Wertham Was Right, and also in Gerry Jones's excellent Men of Tomorrow. The quick version is that Kane met one of our comic book club members at a comic rack in a Los Angeles grocery store and invited him to come visit him. A half-dozen of us made the journey and then I went back later on my own and learned an awful lot of comic history.

On our first trip, Kane acted like he drew Batman with the aid of a few assistants. That was until I let him know that I knew otherwise, whereupon he confessed to what I guess was about 80% of the truth. I'm still amazed he was that candid. Anyway, he did sketches for us all. Everyone else asked for Batman and Kane whipped out a couple of them — obviously stock sketches, largely identical to one another. Most artists, even the great ones, have a little repertoire of head shots they can replicate with their eyes closed.

I think he had two Batman images, one profile and one full-face. The full-face looked a lot like the drawing in the "Batman for President" in the photo above. Kane had done it for a photo session a few weeks earlier. He gave us all autographed copies of the photo and on my second visit, he gave me the original to the poster he was holding in it.

I was the last one to get a sketch from him that first day. Just to throw him a curve and to see what would happen, I asked him for something other than Batman…a drawing of The Penguin. Kane gave a me a little grin as if to say, "You troublemaker," but he picked up his marker and did the drawing you see above right. If you're interested in the question of whether Bob Kane could draw, know that he produced it right in front of me, all by himself. At least, I didn't see Shelly Moldoff under the table. Kane did it straightaway in marking pen without any preliminary underdrawing in about two minutes and I still think it's pretty decent — especially for a guy who was way outta practice. Then again, I suspect it also represented the upper end of his ability.

A website called News Corpse is putting up online videos of Bill O'Reilly's "Talking Points" commentaries…but with a few clever modifications. Take a look.

I probably won't get around to reading Ramesh Ponnuru's new book, Party of Death, online excerpts of which strike me as another of those "let's make money by telling the right wing what it wants to hear" tomes. But I was interested in this review by John Derbyshire, who is an accredited Conservative (he even shares blogging rights with Ponnuru over at The Corner). I don't agree with a lot of what Derbyshire writes so I was intrigued to find some areas of agreement, particularly about the Terri Schiavo case. It all makes for an interesting view on the "Right to Life" movement.

In 1964, the Post cereals people — who practically owned Saturday morning TV, advertising-wise — decided to stop having their commercials interrupted by irrelevant programming. They funded a series called Linus the Lionhearted, starring the character who was then famous only for appearing on the box and in the commercials of their cereal, Post Crispy Critters. In fact, the whole show was filled with faces that adorned Post cereal boxes and ad campaigns…Lovable Truly the Mailman was selling Post Alpha Bits, Little So-Hi appeared for Post Rice Krinkles, Rory Raccoon was the spokesanimal for Post Toasties and Sugar Bear was always hawking Post Sugar Crisp.

Oddly enough, the series was not bad at all…cleverly-written and well-animated…at (reportedly) a budget three times the size of what Hanna-Barbera was then spending to make a cartoon. The great animator Irv Spector was in charge of production and it shows. He also tapped Hoyt Curtin, who did such a fine job providing music for H-B shows, to do the honors for Linus.

And they got some great people to do voices. Sheldon Leonard, best known for his on-screen gangster roles and his behind-the-scenes producer status on The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show and many others had been portraying Linus in the commercials. He kept on doing so and brought along Carl Reiner to voice many of the supporting characters. I'm guessing they also had something to do with the occasional appearances on the show by Jonathan Winters, who popped in, usually to play an evil giant in a So-Hi cartoon. Most of the other characters were voiced by Bob MacFadden (who was sometimes referred to as the Mel Blanc of the New York cartoon voice community) and Gerry Matthews, who did the Bing Crosby imitation as Sugar Bear.

Linus the Lionhearted made it through its first season or two without too many people wondering aloud if it was good to have a kids' show where it was difficult to tell where the commercials stopped and the entertainment content began. The show shifted to ABC in '66, by which time no new episodes were being made. By 1969, the F.C.C. was cracking down on children's shows that blurred the line between ads and programming, and that pretty much was the end of the Linus the Lionhearted series even in reruns. Years later, this policy was reversed, which made possible the infomercial, televangelists and shows funded by toy companies to promote their wares, such as G.I. Joe and The Transformers.

Featured here today is the opening to the Linus show, followed by a commercial spot. Leonard does the voice of Linus and I'm not sure who did the voice of Billie Bird, the obnoxious fowl who hangs around with him. Carl Reiner did the voice of Billie in some cartoons but that's not him. It may be Ed Graham, an ad agency guy who produced the series and who turned up in several episodes playing different characters. It might also be Jerry Stiller who, with spouse-partner Anne Meara, provided occasional voices. Lovable Truly, So-Hi and Rory Raccoon are all voiced by MacFadden and Sugar Bear was, as noted, Gerry Matthews. Oh — and if you listen to the theme song, you may pick out one of the singers…the legendary Thurl Ravenscroft, who provided the voice of Linus's arch-rival, the other great cereal-selling jungle cat, Tony the Tiger. Let's roar…

The season finale of Deal or No Deal managed to take what would have been a rather interesting game had it run 45 minutes, and stretch it to ninety. That's one of the problems the game has. The first part of every round is pretty repetitive as each contestant struggles and sweats and finally decides to reject the early offers that every contestant rejects. As a result, every game seems padded. Another problem is that no one's gotten too close to the top prize and the way the game is structured, it may be a long time before anyone does.

Yet another problem for me is that the show is so heavily edited that it often loses the sense of a real event. In fact, the producers don't seem to care all that much about reality. Tonight's episode began with an armored car, flanked by police cars, driving through Hollywood to the NBC Studios in Burbank and unloading the supermodels with their little briefcases. The suggestion was that there was five million dollars in cash in the armored car so it needed serious protection. But of course, there was no cash in that truck, nor were the models in that truck. In fact, that truck did not even go to a Deal or No Deal taping at NBC. Deal or No Deal doesn't tape at NBC. They do it down at the Sunset-Gower Studios in Hollywood. The whole thing was so bogus that at the end of the show, a disclaimer was flashed so quickly that Barry Allen couldn't have read it. It said…

In the opening sequence, the statements about and portrayals of a police escort for the briefcases, and that the briefcases contained cash delivered from a bank to NBC Studios, were fictitious and included for dramatic purposes.

I dunno…it seems to me that once viewers start feeling that reality is being manipulated, it makes the game part of the show less exciting. Still, the show's doing well in the ratings and tonight's — hyped with a five million smacker top prize and a surprise appearance by Celine Dion, all leading into the season finale of The Apprentice — should do spectacular numbers. So maybe that kind of thing doesn't matter to viewers these days.

While I'm carping about things that bug me about the show — which, by the way, I enjoy in spite of all this — let's talk about that "surprise" appearance by Celine Dion. I guess it was a surprise to the contestant at the taping but NBC hyped the heck out of it in advance. Even my TiVo listing told me that Celine Dion was making a surprise appearance. As they led up to it during the show, we all saw it coming ten blocks away.

I used to love surprise appearances on TV shows. I love it when things happen that you couldn't have expected and lately, they occur about as often as Halley's Comet cruises by. When I was writing variety shows, I couldn't even make one happen.

I was walking across the studio lot and who should I run into but John Travolta? I knew John from when I'd worked on Welcome Back, Kotter a year or two before, and we had a nice reunion. He told me about a film he was doing. I told him about a variety special we were taping in a week or so.  Somehow — I'm not sure how we got to it — he offered to do a cameo guest appearance on our show…and for scale, meaning the minimum money. Wasn't that nice of him? I haven't spoken to the man in a quarter-century but I'd like to believe he's still that nice. He agreed to tape a spot for our show and the only condition was that it be a genuine surprise appearance…not in the ads, not in the TV Guide listing, nowhere.

Naturally, when I told the producers, they were unhappy that John could not be advertised but they figured that an unbilled Travolta cameo was better than no Travolta cameo. A day later, our Network Publicity Department Rep came into my office to ask about the rumored Travolta cameo, I told him it was true but couldn't be advertised. "I promised him we wouldn't publicize it in any way or announce it in advance or anything like that. Do I have your word you won't promote him?"

The Publicity Guy snapped into a boy scout salute and proclaimed, "Absolutely, yes. Cross my heart, word of honor."

I sighed, "Good. I was afraid someone there would put him in the promos."

Still holding his Boy Scout salute, the Publicity Guy said, "Oh, he'll be in the promos."

I replied with something witty. I think it was "Huh?" Something that clever.

The man explained: "Everyone at the network will swear on the lives of their grandmothers that they won't put John Travolta in your promos. They'll sign documents in blood and have them notarized. But I'm telling you, when those promos hit the air, Travolta will be in them. That's just a fact of life."

By now, I was sputtering like a real cheap outboard motor. The man from NBC Publicity continued, "Look, I won't put him in there and no one in my department will put him in there, or at least admit to putting him in there. But John Travolta is hot right now and he can help your ratings…so he's going in. And you'll never know who did it. It may well be one of those people who signed the blood oath they wouldn't do it. I just want you to know this going in so you don't get pissed at me." And he told me an anecdote that illustrated the principle: Someone had promised no advance publicity to get a superstar to appear on some show and then, once the spot was taped, promptly reneged. He shrugged, "What was the guy going to do about it? Sue us?"

I called John, explained the situation to him and he said, "In that case, I'd rather not do it." I didn't blame him one bit.

Since then, I've become especially aware of surprise appearances on TV shows and how rarely they occur. These days, the promo guys are willing to give away everything if they think it'll bring in another hundred thousand viewers — plot twists, shock endings, even who wins. If you've watched the promos for Gameshow Marathon, you already know which celebs advance to the final round, week after next. I don't know if this is commentary on the cutthroat nature of network television or on some variety of attention deficit disorder on the part of the viewing audience which has caused them to need every possible reason to tune in. All I know is that I stopped going to as many movies as I once attended because between the trailers and the clips on talk shows and all the rest of the routine hype, I felt many of them had been ruined for me. And I sometimes feel that way about television programs, as well…which is not to say I expect it to ever change.

These days, everything on TV seems to need a big SPOILER warning. Come to think of it, so does my life.