Monthly Archives: October 2007

Animation expert Jerry Beck will be a guest this afternoon on Stu's Show, the oft-plugged (on this site) signature program of Shokus Internet Radio. I'll be tuning in at 4 PM Pacific Time and you can figure out where to tune in where you are. It's live, he'll be taking questions and I'm going to call in and try to ask one that I know he can't answer. Just to be mean.

And tomorrow, the Time Travel radio show will be having as its guest, The Great Sidekick, himself. That's right…hosts Dan Hollis and Jeff O'Boyle will be interviewing Ed McMahon, commencing at 3 PM Eastern Time — and since I've been Grooing much of the night, I'm way too stupid to figure out when that is where I am. Listen live or download the show later from their website which, I must caution you, plays loud music when you go anywhere near it.

Everyone is saying that our new Attorney General designate, Michael Mukasey, will have to prove his independence and integrity once he is confirmed. Which is as it should be.

And hey, I can even think of a great way he could do this. He could prosecute the guy he's replacing!

The Oscar given to Orson Welles for Citizen Kane. Expected auction selling price: A million bucks, give or take $200,000. Too bad William Randolph Hearst isn't around to bid.

An article about the 25th anniversary of the comic book series I've been up most of the night writing.

In 1958, actor Dean Fredericks had the title role in an NBC TV series, Steve Canyon, based on the comic strip by Milton Caniff. It was, like the syndicated feature on which it was based, a fun and fast-moving effort with some fine guest appearances by character actors of the day who later became famous. (Jerry Paris, later of The Dick Van Dyke Show, had a recurring role. And for that matter, Mary Tyler Moore turned up in an episode playing, of all things, a Hispanic lady.)

For years, it was a "lost" series that went largely unsyndicated. It's still not airing anywhere on TV but the Milton Caniff Estate, which seems to own the series, is trying to change that. The problem is that they don't have a full set of airable prints and the shows need to be undergo costly restoration work. You can help finance this and sample the programs. They're restored the first four and are selling a DVD of them, and whatever they make off that will go into resurrecting the other thirty episodes. (You can also help financially by purchasing a neat-looking Steve Canyon cap they're selling and/or by just making a donation.)

All the info is over here, along with facts and a clip or two from the show. We wish them well.

From a 1962 Bell Telephone Hour broadcast comes this salute to that year's Broadway season. Robert Goulet and Barbara Cook star…and boy, do they have some good songs to sing. But where did those alternate lyrics for "I'm Lovely" (from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum come from?) It's nine minutes but well worth your time even though it goes in and out of sync.

Eleven minutes after I posted the previous item, someone named Orat Perman changed the image on Marie Severin's Wikipedia page and substituted the cover I suggested. Nice work, Orat, whoever you are.

Hey, since Marie Severin is hospitalized with a stroke, let's do something nice for her. Someone go over to Wikipedia and correct the sample cover they have posted there on her listing. The cover of Sub-Mariner #9 was drawn by Herb Trimpe and Dan Adkins, not Marie. If you want to, you could substitute the cover for Not Brand Echh #10, which is actually and totally by the lovely Ms. Severin. I don't know how to edit those pages or I'd do it.

Is this the start of a new trend? The DVD of the latest Die Hard movie will include a copy of the movie that can be transferred to and played on a computer and some portable video players. As the article explains, you'll have to go through an installation process that should discourage most people from passing around copies to their friends — but it does strike me as the industry recognizing that people are transferring movies this way anyway…so they might as well market it as a special feature.

I don't know if this will catch on but I'll bet some company will use it as a way of getting me to buy another copy of Goldfinger. That's really all home video is about.

The Writers Guild of America continues to meet with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers in negotiations that, everyone hopes, will result in a new contract and no WGA strike. Latest word from within the bargaining sessions is that the Producers have withdrawn their demand that writers give up the long-standing custom/right of residuals. This is not a major concession by the AMPTP since everyone knew that was just a bluff for bargaining purposes. Still, I think some are surprised they pulled it off the table now instead of later in the month.

For more on the situation, I recommend this piece by my pal Bob Elisberg. The one thing I would add is something that happens to the ranks of the WGA when strike talk is in the air…and this may be unique to our guild. It's the constant — and in many ways, pointless — division of our ranks into Working Writers and Non-Working Writers.

Most folks who are actively trying to write TV or movies fall into one of those two categories — those who have all the work they can handle and those who are actively (in some cases, desperately) seeking employment. Obviously, there are writers who have some work but could use a little more…but no one really thinks of themselves in that middle ground. They identify with one extreme or the other.

When we strike, each of those two groups thinks they're the ones suffering. The mindset of the "Working Writer" goes something like this…

We're the ones hurting from this. We're the ones walking off real jobs and foregoing real, not possible paychecks. The Non-Working Writers aren't losing much, if anything. They weren't working before the strike and most of them wouldn't be working if there was no strike. They have other sources of income. They have to because they aren't making any money as writers. But we are. We have pilot deals for new series that won't happen because of the strike. We have script deals for movies that will be called off because of the strike. We're the ones who are sacrificing.

And then along comes the "Non-Working Writer." His or her argument goes roughly as follows…

We're the ones hurting from this. We're the ones who really needed a job next week. The Working Writers have huge bank accounts to live off of and in most cases, they've written shows that will rerun during the strike so they'll be making residuals. A lot of them can go on vacation and write episodes and scripts that they can be fairly confident of selling after the strike. Meanwhile, a lot of us have projects that we've been trying to sell for years without making any money…projects that were close to a sale but which will probably not happen because of the strike. We're the ones who are sacrificing.

Needless to say, both are right that they're hurting, wrong that the other group isn't.

And one of the maddening things about WGA strikes is that no matter what the composition or the militancy of the strike force, the Producers — and the portions of Hollywood that have a clear anti-union orientation — will insist that the strike is wholly the will of the latter group; that Working Writers are being dragged kicking 'n' screaming from their posts by guys who really work at Radio Shack by day and pen spec scripts at night. This will be said no matter how loudly the important, show-running, "A-list" writers back the strike.

I should also add: There's actually a third kind of WGA member and they may even constitute a majority. That's a group that we might call Inactive or Barely-Active Writers. It's people who are not pursuing the writing of TV shows or movies as their main profession but have done it on occasion. A successful novelist who wrote one screenplay a few years ago might be said to be in this group. An actor who once wrote an episode of a TV show or a director who once in while gets a writing credit would, as well. Last night, I spoke to a friend of mine who considers himself a musician…and at least 97% of his income the last few years has come from that. But a few years ago, he shared a "written by" credit for a screenplay that was sold but never produced…so he's a WGA member. There are also studio execs who at some point got (or gave themselves) a credit and joined the WGA, either for the prestige or the Health Insurance.

In a few days, we'll have the results of the Strike Authorization Vote that the WGA is holding. The strike will, of course, be authorized. Even if you're a writer (Working or Non-Working) who doesn't want to strike, you don't want to not endorse a strike now; not when your negotiators are still at the bargaining table, trying to wring out the best possible deal before the current contract expires. In fact, it could be argued that to vote against the Strike Authorization now is to make a walkout more likely.

The questions are (a) What will the margin be? And (b), How many WGA members will vote at all? A lot of those who vote no or don't vote at all will be in this category I'm calling Inactive or Barely-Active Writers. They may abstain because a strike will not impact their current endeavors…or they may oppose a strike because they consider themselves mainly actors or directors or producers and they're casting their ballots with those hats in place. This is not like the Pipe-Fitters Union where everyone who votes is probably a guy who makes 95%+ of his income fitting pipe. Writers do other things, including writing other things. Some of us even write comic books.

Let's all send good thoughts in the general direction of Marie Severin, who's presently in a New York hospital recovering from what I'm told is a "minor but serious stroke." Marie, as everyone with a lick of sense knows, is a truly wonderful human with a wicked sense of humor and vast amounts of talent as a comic artist and colorist. It's a shame that no one will ever amass or publish a collection of the devastating cartoons and caricatures she drew of the Marvel staff when she worked on staff for that firm. It would outsell "The Galactus Trilogy."

DC Comics has announced that the first issue of The Spirit that is written by Sergio Aragonés and Yours Truly will be #14, which goes on sale January 16. Mike Ploog is doing a spectacular job with the interior art, which I happen to have before me at the moment since I'm working on my end of things tonight and taking breaks to blog. Jordi Bernet did, as you can see here, a fine cover and I think we may get him to do an issue soon, as well. I'd tell you more about the issue but I have to get back to writing it. (I'm also working on a Groo tonight. Hope I don't get the pages mixed up and have The Spirit eating cheese dip and slaying hordes of soldiers…)

Here's a goodie that Ron Kurer over at ToonTracker found and stuck up on YouTube. It's footage from Off to See the Wizard, a prime-time anthology program for kids that was on ABC from September 9, 1967 until September 20, 1968. It was supposed to do for the MGM film library what the Sunday night Disney show had done for Disney Studios…and it might have, had anyone ever watched it. Ratings were lower than low…and just on an anecdotal basis, I can't recall ever hearing one person I knew say they'd tuned in, nor have I heard even animation buffs or Chuck Jones scholars mention it since it went off.

Jones supervised the production of little cartoon segments that starred animated versions of the main Wizard of Oz characters. They acted as hosts for an awkward array of chopped-up MGM movies (usually cut in two parts and aired over two weeks), unsold pilots and nature films. The first two weeks, for instance, they ran the feature film, Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion. Later on, they ran the two Flipper movies and Lili and a lot of stuff that ABC or MGM had sitting on the shelf. It's not hard to see why it didn't attract an audience.

The clip offers three and a half minutes of animation that the MGM cartoon studio cooked up, including the show's opening and a truncated version of the closing. June Foray provided the voices of Dorothy and of the Wicked Witch, who doesn't appear in this excerpt. Daws Butler did the Wizard, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, with Mel Blanc as the Cowardly Lion. Daws told me once that the MGM lawyers didn't want him to voice the lion because of the lawsuit Bert Lahr had either filed or threatened (Daws wasn't sure which) over the Cocoa Krispies commercials in which Snagglepuss (another lion, voiced by Daws) had sounded a little like Bert Lahr. I told Daws that didn't sound logical. He could have done a voice utterly unlike Lahr…who had died the year before, anyway. Daws shook his head and replied, "Lawyers do a lot of weird things."

This clip ends abruptly in the middle of the end credits but it's the only footage I've seen from this show since '68. And most people didn't even see it then, so it'll probably be new to you…

Twelve former Army Captains write that it's time for the U.S. to either get out of Iraq or institute a military draft. Tomorrow, we'll probably read about how twelve former Army Captains are phony soldiers who hate America and just want to cut and run.

I swore off carbonated beverages in February of 2006 and haven't had so much as a sip of cola or uncola since then. At the time, I was consuming way too many gallons of the stuff per week — at times, it felt like per day — and I also knew I would soon have my Gastric Bypass Surgery. After G.B.S., carbonated drinks are a no-no…so I quit then and there. It turned out to be a much easier addiction to break than I expected.

If I were still drinking sodas, I can't think of one I would less want to sample than the Jones Company's Candy Corn soda, which is part of a limited (fortunately) line of Halloween flavors. Every Thanksgiving, the Jones Boys put out a Turkey-and-Gravy soda which I've also never tried but which at least makes a certain amount of sense to me. I mean, people like turkey and they like gravy and they especially like turkey and gravy. On the other hand, as we all know, no one likes Candy Corn.

Don't bother writing to me and telling me you do. I won't believe you. I grudgingly admit that some people like cole slaw, which is the single most disgusting but technically edible thing on the planet…though I do put such people in the same category as those tribes that like to occasionally stick sharp needles through various body parts. But Candy Corn? That's just repulsive.

The only way I can possibly rationalize Candy Corn Soda is that it's the "trick" option of "trick or treat." The kids come to your door in their adorable ghost and ghoul costumes…and you'd really like to do what they used to do to Charlie Brown, which is to dump a rock in his sack. But you decide that's too nice so you give them Candy Corn Soda. That'll teach the little bastards.

I know this is a disgusting topic but I have to post this as a public service. If you're a responsible parent, you'll be checking out your kids' Halloween acquisitions before you allow any consumption. You'll be scrutinizing their hauls for razor blades or pins or poisons…and you should. But you should really be on the lookout for Candy Corn Soda. There just may be someone in your neighborhood who's sick enough to do that to a child.