Monthly Archives: November 2007

This is a still from the movie The Greatest Show on Earth and that's Jimmy Stewart under that clown makeup. But never mind him. Take a look at that little girl. That's Beverly Washburn, an actress who has had one of the most amazing careers of anyone in Hollywood. I'd start listing great stars she's worked with and great films and TV shows she's been in but it might be easier to itemize the few she's missed.

Take a look at this list which isn't even close to complete. For instance, she did a lot more work with Jack Benny, who was kind of a mentor to her. Nor is the list done with, since she still works an awful lot.

Ms. Washburn will be discussing her astonishing career tomorrow on Stu's Show, the flagship program on Shokus Internet Radio. She'll be on live with Stu Shostak from 4 PM to 6 PM Pacific time, which is probably 7 PM to 9 PM back east. Click on over to the Shokus site for details on how you can listen in (and even phone in) to enjoy what will surely be a great show.

A public service announcement from (apparently) the early sixties with the great comic actor, Jack Gilford…

Postings here, especially about the WGA strike, may get a little erratic starting Wednesday. That's when I head East, though I'll keep in touch. Never stray too far from your weblog, my mother always taught me.

This coming weekend, I'll be among the many guests at the Big Apple/National Comic Convention in New York City, which is being held at the Penn Plaza Pavilion. More info can be obtained over at this website. I will be hosting two panels there. On Saturday at Noon, I'll be moderating one on Marvel in the Sixties and Seventies with a bunch of folks who worked on the comics then. The lineup isn't firm but it'll probably include Dick Ayers, John Romita, Herb Trimpe, Gary Friedrich and Joe Sinnott. And isn't it nice to hear that Joe, who was so sick not long ago, is well enough to travel into Manhattan to attend a comic convention?

Then on Sunday at 4 PM, Sergio Aragonés and I will be discussing on our bizarre and altogether unlikely work on Groo the Wanderer and some upcoming projects, including Will Eisner's The Spirit, which we are ruining writing for the folks at DC.

Then the following weekend, I'll be in Columbus, Ohio and so will Sergio. We'll be among the guests at Roger Price's wonderful Mid-Ohio Con, which takes place November 24 and 25 in Battelle Hall in the Columbus Convention Center. I've been to these before and they're always sensational…so if there's any chance you can make it, make it. Details on the con are here.

At both cons, if you see me and won't be ashamed to be seen in my presence, say hello, tell me you love the weblog, whatever. Just don't lie to me and tell me you're the guy who likes Candy Corn.

Let's find out on this site.

And while we're at it, let's check to see if Abe Vigoda is still alive.

This should be required viewing for anyone who says there's no money to be made on the Internet…

The writers of Late Show With David Letterman have nothing better to do so they've started a blog. Looks like this one will be worth keeping an eye on.

One of them, Lee Ellenberg, tells a story about embarrassing himself by going up to Andrew Bergman on the picket line and telling him (wrongly) that he wrote the movie, The Jerk. I have an anecdote that links right up with that.

I had this lady friend who often did not know the credits of people she met around me. We got into the habit of me whispering them to her so she could participate in conversations and not just stand there feeling excluded.

So one day, we're at Farmers Market and I see the fine screenwriter Carl Gottlieb. He spots me and heads over to say howdy so I quickly whisper who he is to my friend. The three of us have a nice conversation and then, after we part, she turns to me and says, "He seemed very nice and very smart."

"Yes," I say. "Carl's one of the brightest guys I know."

She asks me, "Then why did you say he was a jerk?"

"No, no," I say. "I said he wrote The Jerk."

Another photo from last night's banquet staged by the Comic Art Professionals Society. Dave Folkman took this photo of CAPS President Bill Morrison, Sergio Aragonés, that Stan guy again and me. Bill is the guy in charge at Bongo Comics, publisher of The Simpsons, and he authored the current Captain Carrot mini-series drawn by Scott Shaw!

Stan is holding the award he was presented at the ceremony. It's called the Sergio, it was sculpted by the brilliant Rubèn Procopio and it looks a lot like Guess Who. I'll try to get a better photo of it up here one of these days.

At left in the photo above, you have Marv Wolfman, writer of cartoons and comic books and co-creator of many comic book characters not co-created by the guy in the middle. The guy in the middle is Stan Lee, and I probably don't have to tell anyone who'd find their way to this website who Stan Lee is and what he's done. The dashing gent at right is me and the photo was taken last night at the annual banquet of the Comic Art Professionals Society as it honored the guy in the middle.

I got to be the Master of Ceremonies and make a speech. Marv spoke, a member named Pat McGreal assembled a wonderful video overview of Stan's career and Scott Shaw! presented a special Stan Lee edition of his Oddball Comics slideshow, displaying some of the odder comics that Stan has worked on in his long career. Stan had to sit there and listen to it all. No wonder he got drunk.

The room (at a posh county club in Northridge) was packed with interesting, talented folks. Most were cartoonists but there were also actors like June Foray and Gary Owens, all convened to toast Stan and celebrate his life and times. It was a great evening and I'll post a few more photos as soon as the folks who took them e-mail them my way.

A performer and producer of Internet content named David Lawrence, who probably knows nothing about me just as I know nothing about him, has written and circulated a little essay, mostly I gather throughout the voiceover community. (Well, I do know one thing about Mr. Lawrence, which is that he constantly bombards me with self-promotional Spam and I wish he'd stop.) His article argues that the WGA is going about its strike all wrong, and that his union (he's in SAG) will make the same mistake if they fight for a share of Internet revenues. Since a couple of folks have asked me what I think of it, I thought I'd post my response. But first, if you somehow didn't find a copy in your e-mailbox amidst the Cialis ads and would like to read it, it's been posted here.

Okay then. Let me tell you why I don't think his argument holds a lot of H2O…

The argument is that there's no money to be made on things like webisodes on the Internet so it's daffy for a union to fight for that when they could be fighting for other, more tangible things. His primary evidence seems to be that he's tried it (the man has dozens of websites) and he hasn't been able to make any money on the Internet so that proves (I guess) that Disney, Time Warner, Fox, Sony, Paramount and Universal won't make any money on the Internet. He's been producing or appearing on webisodes like Goodnight Burbank and Infected on Revision3 and other ventures most of us have never heard of and they make only pennies. So obviously if ABC starts offering downloads of Lost on the Internet for a fee or Sony lets you download the next Spider-Man movie for a couple bucks, they'll make only pennies.

Or maybe he thinks they'll make nickels, I don't know. I also don't get the part where he says "I've also figured out ways to make several millions of dollars on the Internet over the last 15 years or so" but then goes on to say you can't make any money on the Internet. Later, he appends "…the money I've made on the Internet does not obviate my statement that the networks aren't making, or can't make, money on the net — in fact, it proves they can."

So, uh, if they can, might this not be a good time for us to start demanding a hunk of that money? I mean, if you can figure out how to make money on the 'net, there must be someone at all those big companies who can stumble onto the secret. Or maybe the guys at Google who are blissfully unaware there's no money to be made selling web advertising could come up with something.

You know what this reminds me of? When home video was starting — this was in the Flintstonian era of Beta — there were a few stores selling movies on tape. There weren't many because none of the major studios were yet offering the movies we really wanted. At that moment, there wasn't a lot of cash in home video. The day you could start buying mainstream releases, the day I bought the first of the ninety-three different versions of Goldfinger I've had to purchase over the years, it all changed. The big studios, the ones that control and define the business, went almost instantly from "We'll never sell our movies for home viewing" to "How fast can we get the DVD into stores?"

The home video biz exploded and the unions were way behind the curve. They're still playing Catch-Up because the Producers were able to structure the business in terms that were disadvantageous to sharing. And now the same companies are trying to do the same thing with Internet transmissions, defining almost everything as "promotional" and therefore not subject to established residual deals.

Are they really making no money on the Internet? They sure don't seem to think so. Every single entertainment conglomerate is assuring its stockholders that there are zillions to be made there and that the company is expertly positioned to maximize those bucks. More to the immediate point, if there's no money to be made on the Internet, it oughta be a breeze to halt the crippling strike that's costing them millions per day and destroying their Fall TV schedule and plans for film production in early '08. All they have to do it offer us a respectable percentage of that "no money" or a formula where our share kicks in only after revenues hit a certain level that reasonably denotes financial success. If there's no money, that won't cost them anything.

Of course, how much they're making today is not what this strike is about. It's how much they stand to make tomorrow and whether we're going to let them unilaterally write the rulebook for an industry that belongs to all of us. Some of us don't think that's such a great idea.

With all due respect to Mr. Lawrence, who I don't know at all, I suspect he's been working the Poverty Row corner of the Internet, not the section that Disney and Time Warner are looking to build. He speaks of actors working for free on webisodes. If I were in SAG, I think I'd like my union to be making it clear to Sony that they can't get union talent to work on their 'net projects for free. If I were an actor on Ugly Betty, I think I'd like my union to tell its production company that they can't, in lieu of rerunning those shows on network and paying me the agreed-upon residuals, slap them up on an ad-supported website and let a million people download them with nothing going my way.

They're not putting content on the web in order to lose money. These people don't even give anything away because they think they'll break even on the deal. They're doing it because they think they'll make enough cash to make Richie Rich look like M.C. Hammer. They may tell you that they aren't making any money off the deal but come on. These are the people who were telling Alan Alda that the M*A*S*H TV show had yet to turn a profit. Not only do we not have to believe them but they don't really expect us to believe them. It's just something they say as part of the never-ending campaign in this world to get talented people to write and perform and otherwise work for little or no money. If we let them get away with it, there will be no money on the Internet…for us.

KABC, the local ABC television station in Los Angeles, commissioned a poll about how the general population of the town views the Writers Guild Strike. 69% said they're on the side of the Writers, 8% sides with the studios and the rest aren't taking sides. That's a lot better for our team than I would ever have imagined.

Here's a news clip of Bill Scott and June Foray from around 1985 when they made an appearance at an animation festival in Boston. That was probably one of Bill's last public appearances before a heart attack took him away from us.

I wrote my little morning rant about how we're being told there's no money on the Internet before I (just) read Damon Lindelof in this morning's New York Times. If I had, I could have saved myself a lot of time and just linked to him.

This morning, I posted a clip of Judy Garland and Mel Tormé singing. At the very end of the number, Ms. Garland hits and holds a very long note and the question has come up as to whether she did this live at the taping or if there was an audio trick employed.

I'm sure a singer of her ability could sustain a note like that under ideal conditions. But this was taped live in front of a studio audience and it came at the end of a two-minute number that was shot without edits. In a recording studio, a singer can do it a hundred times and they can even "punch in," redoing just a small section of a recording. They couldn't have Judy and Mel keep doing the number over and over and over until she got it right…or could they? What if it took ten or twenty takes and blew out her voice? Also, it's worth noting that Judy was taping an entire variety show that day, which is a tiring and stressful task for anyone.

I was once involved with a variety show for which a prominent singing star sang live during the taping but — just in case — he'd also prerecorded all his vocals so that if his voice started to go on him, he could lip-sync to those tracks. And by the end of the day, we were using them.

We can all watch the clip of Judy and venture guesses as to whether she really sang that last note live. I'm wondering if anyone knows for sure.

We start today — and since I'm tight on time, we may close today — with this one from this one from Peter W. Randall…

The folks at my office say it's silly for the Writers to strike over a piece of revenue from the Internet since there is no revenue on the Internet. No one's making money on the Internet, they say. What do you say to that?

I say that by allowing this strike to happen, the Producers have already probably cost themselves a minimum of $500 million and it could easily spill over into the billions within a week or three. They've thrown almost every phase of their businesses into uncertainty and chaos. They're laying off loyal employees and discussing how much of the audience they'll lose during the strike which might never come back to their product.

It would be Braindead Stupid of them to let all that occur if they could have headed it off by giving us a tiny percentage of an area where there isn't or won't be any money. You can do the math on this yourself. What's 5% of Zero? Oh, hell. Let's be generous. Make it 10%.

There's an e-mail circulating from some guy who's arguing the point your friends are arguing. In it, he says in effect, "I can tell you that from my experience that there's almost no money to be made on the Internet and I oughta know. I have a whole bunch of websites and I've barely made a dime off them." The reply to that, of course, is: "That's because you, unlike NBC, aren't offering full episodes of My Name Is Earl on your website."

But it's actually more than that because the WGA stance is not about getting X% out of what's currently coming in. It's about not allowing the Producers to build an entire infrastructure on the 'net with all sorts of precedents and definitions established that will long exclude the unions from sharing in new revenue streams. For instance, they want to say that just about anything they put on a website for streaming or download, regardless of how they can "monetize" it (hate that verb) is "promotional" and therefore should be exempt from residuals. We need to nip that one, as Deputy Fife used to say, in the bud.

There are a lot of predictions about where the delivery and sale of content is going with regard to the web but every single one involves a closer relationship with the old methods and a blurring of the distinctions. To make this point, let me tell you about My TiVo.

My TiVo is a wonderful thing. Actually, it's so wonderful that I have three of them but let's just talk about one. I can set My TiVo to record The Office and then I can watch The Office at my convenience. That alone would make it a good thing but My TiVo can do so much more than that because my TiVo is connected to this amazing thing called the Internet. Because it is, My TiVo can download movies from outfits like Amazon and Netflix. I can buy a movie and watch it in my home without the studios even having to spend the three cents or whatever it costs to make a DVD these days. I can use My TiVo to listen to XM Satellite Radio. If I had My TiVo hooked up to cable TV, depending on where I lived, I might be able to have My TiVo download that episode of The Office for a fee if I didn't record it when it first aired. I've downloaded TV shows and movies from the Internet via my computer and transferred them to My TiVo for viewing purposes. Any day now, I'll probably be able to download anything I could ever want to watch via the Internet and watch it on My TiVo.

And I do all this on the same machine, punching the same buttons on the same remote control. I watch on the same TV and since Time Warner owns my cable company and Fox owns much of my satellite provider…well, the experience of watching television via the old-fashioned means is almost seamlessly morphing into the experience of watching it via the Internet.

The old business models are all changing. The old financial structure of broadcast television from a Writer's viewpoint, was that you write the show for X dollars, predicated on the understanding that if it reruns, you'll receive Y dollars. Everyone agreed to that…perhaps grudgingly in some cases, but they agreed. A Writer's compensation for writing a show is not X dollars. It's X plus whatever Y yields. But in the new model, the Producers are paying X and then if the Y part goes anywhere near the Internet, they argue it's "promotional" and claim that no back-end money is due. Or at best, they insist they'll pay on the DVD formula, which isn't nothing but it's close.

That's dangerous for the Writers in a couple of ways. Not only do we lose a vital part of our incomes but as more and more of the studios' and networks' profits come via Internet delivery, they're going to be arguing that the old first-run, conventional network parts of their operations are less profitable. They'll use that as an argument for cutting X. So if we don't establish our stake in all these new technologies now, we'll lose on both ends. We'll have no share of the expanding field and a smaller share of the shrinking one.

Or look at it from the standpoint of a guy who writes movies. I, as a consumer, can purchase and watch your film more ways than ever before, all by sitting in this very chair, watching the same TV screen and using the same remote control device. I can watch it on broadcast television. I can watch it on HBO. I can watch it on pay-per-view. I can rent the DVD from Netflix and watch it here. I can buy the DVD from Amazon and watch it here. I can have Amazon or Netflix do a digital delivery to My TiVo. And once it's on My TiVo, there's not a lot anyone can do to stop me from burning a DVD of it or putting it on my iPod or my iPhone or my iChing or whatever iHave.

From the POV of a consumer, it's pretty much the same to me: Same TV, same remote control, same chair, even the same movie. But the back-end dollars to you, the Writer, can vary wildly from decent to non-existent…and any day now, it'll be worse. Because Time-Warner is now streaming (for a fee) episodes of vintage and recent TV shows and is close to marketing vintage, recent and maybe even current movies the same way.

When the Producers say, "There's no money in the Internet," they're not to be believed. They never say there's any money when it means sharing with anyone. They brag to stockholders how much they're making and their executives receive the kind of salaries you pay someone who's making zillions for you…but when any union staggers up like Oliver Twist and says, "Please, sir, may I have some more?", they cry poverty and wail about unrecoupable losses and gasp, "More? You have to get less!"

I mean, these are the people who told James Garner they'd never made a profit on The Rockford Files and who were arguing until just recently that the original Star Trek was still in deficits. And we're supposed to believe them that they haven't quite figured out the Internet yet? That they need another three or six years to study how to make money on it so they'll know how to cut us in on it? (Yeah, I'm sure our cut will be their number one concern.) Three or six years from now, they'll only have figured out how to totally exclude writers, actors, directors and other contributors from the table. Because these companies are really good at devising ways of making money…and even better at devising excuses to not share it. Why on Earth would we want to give them any more of a head start than they've already had?

Several of my favorite websites have started featuring ads that play audio — often, quite loud audio — the second you click over to the site. Or maybe I should say they used to be some of my favorite websites before they started doing that.