Monthly Archives: November 2007

Negotiations are scheduled to resume mañana in the AMPTP/WGA standoff. I will be surprised if they result in a quick meeting of the minds. The more likely scenario is at least one more flare-up where both sides claim they've made major concessions to settle the thing and the other side has not responded in good faith.

But I must admit that a lot about this strike has not gone according to script; that things that seemed inevitable based on past WGA strikes have not occurred. In the past, we always had a loud faction within the Guild that decried striking; that said that whatever Management offered was good enough and that we should grab it and get back to the keyboards. I've barely heard a peep in that direction this time, not even from certain parties who'd say that if the offer was for us to henceforth pay them to let us write movies. I have also not seen my Guild rupture along the usual fault line of the Haves and Have-Nots; of the so-called "working writers" and the usually-unemployed.

In every past WGA walkout of my life, the major talking point from the Producers was that the strike was not truly supported by the "working writers," the ones who actually comprised the industry. It was those outta-work, nothing-to-lose types that were driving the strike, they said. It was never true but it was a hard assertion to knock down. No matter how many Larry Gelbarts and Phil Alden Robinsons got up and proclaimed their militancy, the story would spread that the strike was nothing more than a temper tantrum of bitter, unemployable guys who earned their livings working at Radio Shack. (For some reason, of all the dopey places one can work these days, Radio Shack became the place most often cited. At one WGA rally during the '88 strike, someone even stood outside passing out employment applications for Radio Shack.)

Hasn't happened this time and I'm amazed.

I'm not sure how much of that is attributable to the outrageousness of the Producers' position and how much is due to good p.r. work by my Guild, rallying the important folks and getting them out front-and-center. I'm sure it's both but I'm not sure which has been the more important. When the Producers' spokesguy Nick Counter goes out and makes his assertions that we don't understand the business, you get the feeling that even he doesn't believe it…but I guess the guy has to say something. Regardless of how this thing turns out, the folks who employ him to keep unions from gaining any muscle in town can't be too happy at how this one's been managed.

The Las Vegas production of The Producers will close February 9 of '08, which is one year after it opened and probably way sooner than its backers expected. It would be nice if the lesson learned from this was that if you're going to do a hit Broadway show, do the show that was a hit on Broadway, not a 90-minute cutdown version. But that's not what the folks who mount Vegas shows will think. They'll say it proves there's no market for theater in their city.

A good time is being had by, it would seem, all at the Mid-Ohio Con here in chilly (but not unpleasant) Columbus, Ohio. Roger Price, who operates this annual post-Thanksgiving feast, really knows how to put on a friendly convention. There's plenty to do and plenty to buy but it never feels cramped or hectic. I'm especially impressed with the vast number of small-press and self-publishers displaying their wares. There are some very fine comics on display from such folks.

I've decided to start paring down my convention reports here since all they ever seem to say is that I'm enjoying myself and my panels went well, and then I list folks with whom I chatted. This is a waste of my time and yours, so just assume all is well and then guess who I saw.

I will say it's nice to be able to put faces to a lot of e-mail addresses. Years ago before the Internet, I would often meet at cons, people I only knew from correspondence and/or mimeographed fanzines. Once I did, I would no longer think of them as an elite typeface or a bizarre array of indents and margins. Now when I meet in person someone I met over the Internet, they stop looking like their AOL address or their weblog.

Three panels tomorrow and on one, I get to interview the Once and Future Lois Lane…the actress who played her on the 50's Superman series, Noel Neill. Should be fun.

Michael Kinsley on what it takes to be president. I think I agree with the line about how the unpopularity of George W. Bush is hurting Hillary Clinton in a way. As Kinsley notes, a lot of people are saying, "Enough with relatives, already."

The past few years, this weblog has celebrated the work of a brilliant cartoonist named Don Martin by noting his very funny holiday, National Gorilla Suit Day. I've encouraged you to remember the late Mr. Martin and his work and now I'm in the odd position of…well, not discouraging you but just announcing that Don's widow has asked me not to mention him or his holiday and to delete all past mentions of both. I don't fully understand why but I still have (and will always have) the greatest respect for the man…so I've done as she asks. I don't think I would do this for anyone else so Mrs. George W. Bush and Mrs. Dick Cheney, don't bother asking.

The following is a review of a production of the show, Monty Python's Spamalot. It contains information that warrants a big, fat SPOILER ALERT. If you don't want to know what happens, read no further.

Now then: Due to the Stagehands' Strike, you can't see Spamalot on Broadway at the moment but you can in Columbus, Ohio, at least while the national touring company is parked here for the next few days. This evening, my friend Carolyn and I, accompanied by Maggie Thompson of The Comics Buyers Guide, saw it at the Ohio Theater, not far from where the Mid-Ohio Con is taking place this weekend. If this troupe is wandering anywhere near you — according to this page, they go next to Toledo — you might want to do so. I dunno how the original cast was in New York or how the currently-idle cast there is but these folks put on an awfully good show.

It is, of course, freely (very freely) adapted from one of my and probably your all-time favorite movies, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but there's an awful lot that's new. And funny. And even hummable. They also have one of the funniest Playbills I've ever seen.

I did want to mention the main cast members because they were all quite splendid: Michael Siberry, Esther Stilwell, Ben Davis, Jeff Dumas, Christopher Gurr, Patrick Heusinger, Robert Petkoff and Christopher Sutton. And there was one other person on stage who really gave an outstanding performance, and I think he deserves special mention. I am speaking, of course, of me.

Here's where that SPOILER ALERT kicks in. At one point in the show, they haul an audience member who's sitting in a certain seat up on stage to be a part of a key scene. Guess who was the lucky (?) person sitting in that seat. It was rather odd to be watching the play one moment and being on stage and a part of it, the next.

In a situation like that, you kind of have to play dumb because the show's on auto-pilot and anything odd you do can only screw things up for them. So I nodded and grinned as they asked my name and then used it in subsequent dialogue and a song…and then returned to my seat with a Polaroid photo of me and the cast, and a little Python Foot trophy they present to whoever gets conscripted to participate. Carolyn and Maggie were both thrilled, and not because I was in that seat instead of one of them. They just thought the show was better with me in it. If you go see it, I probably won't be in it but don't let that stop you.

Over at Slate, they're offering a slide show of 11 Peanuts strips that, they say, capture the essence of the magnum opus of Charles M. Schulz. The text leans a bit heavily on the new David Michaelis book that is endorsed by no one who actually knew Schulz…but the observations are worth some consideration.

Like Kevin Berger, I would like there to be a No Music Day in the United States, and for the same reasons. Actually, I'd settle for a No Music Day in restaurants where I'm with someone with whom I'd like to have a conversation.

Can't believe I forgot to get this one up here in greater detail. At the big National Comic Book Convention in New York last Saturday, I moderated a wonderful panel with four veterans of Marvel Comics: Dick Ayers, Joe Sinnott, Herb Trimpe and Gary Friedrich. And when I say "veterans," I don't just mean veterans of working in comics. Dick, as befitting the man who drew all them issues of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, wore his old Army uniform from World War II, which is still intact and still fits. (In the above photo, we have — left to right — me, Gary, Herb, Dick and Joe.)

So I'm chatting with all these gents and right in the middle of the panel, my little BlackBerry vibrates to tell me I got an e-mail and it turns out it's Stan Lee, who's way off in Los Angeles at that moment, writing to thank me for things I said about him (and didn't say) at that dinner the previous Sunday. I couldn't resist reading his e-mail to the audience there and quickly writing him back:

Hi. I am at this very moment moderating a panel at a New York con with Dick Ayers, Joe Sinnott, Gary Friedrich and Herb Trimpe. They all say hi and the audience was thrilled when I read your email to them. Any message for them?

That was sent at 12:26 PM EST. At 12:44, while the panel was still going on and I could read the message to the crowd there, I received the following in reply:

Yeah, here's a message for them — tell them to stay away from hick towns from now on and have their next convention in L.A. so I can be with 'em!

Excelsior!
Stan

So that was how we sorta/kinda got Stan Lee on the Marvel Panel even though he was 3000+ miles away and unaware it was even taking place. This is precisely the kind of thing that the Internet was invented for. Well, that and porn.

Sorry to hear of the death at age 68 of actor-writer Michael Blodgett. He had a pretty successful career as a novelist but most folks will remember him as Lance Rocke, the dislikable stud who got his head lopped off in the classic movie, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Me, I'll remember him best as the host of Groovy, a bizarre local (in Los Angeles) TV show that I wrote about here. Here's a link to the L.A. Times obit which reminded me of his short-lived talk show. As I recall, he was pretty good at it.

I've written an awful lot of comics and while it's wrong to play favorites, I have to say that one of mine was a book called Crossfire, which was created by myself, Will Meugniot and Dan Spiegle, written by me and drawn by Dan. Working with him was a joy, and that knowing he'd be drawing what I was writing caused me to write some of the things of which I'm proudest. I have genuinely missed not working with Dan the last decade or so, and especially not doing Crossfire.

Well, I've gotten to do both again…only for eight pages but, hey, eight's better than zero. Coming your way in March is the first issue of Many Happy Returns, an anthology which will resurrect some notable comics of the past, and there's a newly-concocted Crossfire story in there. Go over to this page for the full info. And just imagine the wide grin on my face as I get to announce this.

Mark (that's me) is back in Columbus, Ohio. I drove back here last evening from Muncie — about a 2.5 hour commute, the first half of which was under heavy drizzle and the last half of which was with streaming H2O fighting to overpower my wipers. I'm not a big fan of driving in the rain but it's a lot easier here, where the roads and drivers expect it, than it is in Southern California where everyone's so utterly unprepared for the whole concept of water coming down from the sky.

My rental car contains the new Garmin GPS, which is quite good except that it has never heard of the street on which Jim Davis's office is situated. Last year in Muncie, I got around via a Hertz rental with their "NeverLost" system, which sounds like something Peter Pan would use to find his way home. It's a Magellan-brand Global Positioning System and it performed so well that I got one for my car when I returned home. The Garmin is superior in some ways — it speaks the names of streets, for instance, whereas my Magellan just says to turn in X miles — but I suspect the main differences are because the Garmin is new, whereas my Magellan is almost a year old.

Last year's Magellan GPS could find the street on which the Garfield office is located but this year's Garmin couldn't so I got briefly lost. I pulled over to the side of an unpaved road to figure out what to do next and a woman came by and asked if she could help. I told her the name of the street I was seeking and she said, "Oh, you're going to see the guy with the cat." She then proceeded to tell me exactly how to get to that street and I proceeded to drive exactly as she instructed…and within five minutes, I was exactly Hopelessly Lost, as opposed to my previous condition, which was only Hopefully Lost.

What I did at that point: The Garmin couldn't find Jim's street but I remembered a Burger King that was located not far from the office and I figured the Garmin could find that. Sure enough, it directed me there and then I used my own low-tech memory to find my way to the studio of The Guy With The Cat. Which is what I've learned you have to do with GPS units. They're not a substitute for thinking or even for knowing where places are. They're just to help you chart and follow routes. The best part is that you can keep glancing at the screen and think, "Yep, I'm still on the right road." Or find out quickly when you aren't.

This is turning out to be a great trip but I do regret not being in Los Angeles during two weeks of what's turning out to be The Great Writers Strike of '07 and Maybe Part of '08. I did picket (in the rain, no less) the Viacom building in Times Square but even if I'd brought a sign along, there's no place worth picketing in Muncie or Columbus. From all reports, the big mass picket/demonstration on Hollywood Boulevard the other day was a smashing success, proving that "the town" is behind the WGA strike and — of great importance — that it is widely understood that the disruption of the industry is due to the Producers' behavior and not to the Writers being unreasonable.

This concept seems to be lost on some. I am bewildered that it is lost on a man named Thomas Short, who is the current president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. Mr. Short continues to blast my union, cursing our strike and writing things like, "The IATSE alone has over 50,000 members working in motion picture, television and broadcasting and tens of thousands more are losing jobs in related fields."

I expect Management to make such remarks but Mr. Short presides over an aggregate of unions that find the occasional necessity to strike and those strikes always, without exception, inconvenience others and often lead to layoffs and loss of employment. It is a regrettable fact of union activity. Even now, the Stagehands' strike in New York (which everyone back there except the employers seems to support, by the way) is creating hardships for innocent bystanders and causing non-IA workers to lose jobs. The strike was authorized by Mr. Short.

I'm currently on Honorable Withdrawal (I think they call it something else) from the Animation Guild, which is a division of IATSE. But when I was a member, I walked its picket lines and endured the same criticism from the companies we were striking: Our strike was hurting the business, it was causing Filmation to layoff secretaries and Hanna-Barbera to terminate contracts, etc. I understood why the heads of Disney were saying things like that to try and act like the strike was in no way their fault; like it was wholly because the evil/stupid union wouldn't just accept whatever it was offered and remain on the job. I don't understand a man who represents some very good, effective unions talking like that.

But he may not have much to complain about for very long. What I'm getting from "the buzz" is that while no one expects the WGA strike to end right after talks resume on the 26th, there's a lot of optimism that it won't last months longer; that the Producers have decided they'll lose way too much if they stonewall until the WGA starts to wobble. They seem to have realized that if they drag this out to April or May, they'll wind up with much the same terms they can get right now. More significant: The Screen Actors Guild is already ramped-up and determined to strike at the end of June '08 if they don't make the kinds of gains the WGA strike is all about. If the Producers settle with the WGA by the end of December, they stand a real good chance of getting scripts and shooting a lot of movies and TV episodes in January through June. So if there is a SAG strike (or even, God forbid, a DGA one), they'll be in better shape to weather and resist it.

Before every possible WGA strike of the past, there has always been the threat of "stockpiling" — the idea that the Producers would commission extra scripts, build up an inventory and therefore be able to better endure a prolonged WGA walkout. That hasn't happened much, this time or ever. They need us around to write and rewrite up to the point when filming or rehearsals commence, and even after that, so it's never very practical. On the other hand, there is an obvious advantage to the Producers to have a stockpile of completed shows and movies in case they can't make the deal they want with the Actors and/or the Directors. Right now, the WGA strike is an obstacle to them buildng up that stockpile.

So there are some big reasons for optimism. Which is not to suggest I'm optimistic quite yet about the strike ending. I'm just optimistic that we may soon have good reasons for optimism. Whatever, it looks like I'll still have plenty of opportunities to picket when I get back to Los Angeles.

Have a joyous Thanksgiving Day, everyone. I'm going to be thankful for, at long last, a real Internet Connection.

Here's another of the Private Snafu cartoons that were produced primarily by the Warner Brothers Cartoon Studio (with a few outsiders pitching in) during World War II. I told more about the series here so what you need to know now is that this is The Chow Hound, which was directed by Frank Tashlin, who went on to write and/or direct live-action films with Bob Hope, Jerry Lewis and others of that stature. Mel Blanc is Snafu and some of the other folks. The other male voice in there is a man named Robert C. Bruce, who the WB Cartoon Boys used to use as a narrator for their travelogue parodies. This was released in June of 1944.

I feel a need to apologize for the paucity of postings on this here site. I'm still outta town, staying (tonight) at a lovely little bed 'n' breakfast inn that has been open a grand total of one day. I'm the first guest to stay in this room, where — as you might have expected — the Internet Connection doesn't work. So I'm still BlackBerry-blogging which, even with my add-on keyboard ain't so easy.

But maybe you're better off that way because if I could post long posts, all you'd get would be me yakkin' on about what a good time I'm having on this trip. (In case you care, and I can't imagine why you would, I'm in Muncie, Indiana for meetings with Jim Davis on upcoming Garfield projects.) This coming weekend, I'll be in Columbus, Ohio for the gala Mid-Ohio Con, seeing friends and hosting panels. And then it's back to Los Angeles…but regular posting here should resume before that. All I need is a decent Internet Connection. I couldn't find one in New York or Indiana. Maybe I'll have better luck in Ohio.

In my continuing quest to blog from the unlikeliest of places, the previous entry was — swear to God — blogged from my Blackberry to the World Wide Web from the back seat of a limo careening through New York City streets as Carolyn and I made our way to La Guardia Airport.

I don't know why I did it but I did it.

This one's coming to you live from a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio. I'll explain in a few days why we're here.

News of the WGA Strike? Well, as you probably heard, they're heading back into negotiations on the 26th of this month. That presumably means both sides have indicated some willingness to bend on heretofore-intractable points. That does not indicate a quick settlement is at hand. For one thing, the bending may not be enough. For another, there are still all those areas that have yet to be addressed at all. Even if DVD revenues and Internet Streaming are no longer obstacles, something else can and probably will be, Then again, some movement is better than no movement. I still think we should lock all the parties in a room with salty snacks and nothing to drink until they arrive at a deal.