Monthly Archives: January 2008

R.D. Francis just sent me this message…

Isn't it early to write Giuliani out of the race? My understanding is that he's had a poor showing at least in part because his campaign is focused on the states with the most delegates to the convention, and where he expects to be able to do well (like New York state).

Now, it's still entirely possible that, in spite of not being mathematically eliminated, his profile will simply have slipped low enough (or that the people will assume that the numbers he's gotten are the best he can do in the states the have held their caucuses and primaries) that he won't do well even where he is trying; but, in all fairness, the real test of the strategy has not yet arrived.

I admit to being a bit curious; I'm not sure what the minimum number of states one can take and still win the nomination (or, for that matter, the presidency) is. I'm not so fond of this strategy, as it allows for the practical disenfranchisement of any number of smaller states (from Alaska and Hawaii to Rhode Island and Maine, at a guess). After all, what the American people really don't need is more reasons to feel disenfranchised or divided.

Giuliani has yet to win a primary and yes, he's pinned his strategy on big states like Florida and New York. But at the moment, he's running a distant third in Florida and may even come in fourth. In New York, the most recent USA Today/Gallup poll has McCain at 42% in that state and Giuliani at 24%. Now admittedly, the polls have not been that accurate in these primaries but they'd have to be a lot wronger than they've been for Rudy to take either state, and he probably needs both. (Also admittedly, there was a point where it looked like McCain was running for naught but Giuliani doesn't have time to make that kind of turnaround.)

Technically, I believe anyone can still win. As I understand it, if no one clinches a majority of the delegates before the convention — possible, not probable — and no one wins on the first ballot, Al Gore and Jeb Bush could sweep into their respective conventions and be nominated and we could have the 2000 election all over again. I don't think that's going to happen, just as I don't think Rudy is going to be the nominee. Not with his past showing in primaries, not with his poll numbers in the upcoming ones, and not with so many prominent G.O.P. leaders clearly opposed to him. My guess is he does so poorly in Florida that he pulls out then, rather than endure the humiliation of having his home state knock him out completely.

There have been 486 issues of Mad Magazine. That's a staggering number. Why, as the editors themselves would tell you, that must represent more than a hundred jokes.

Mike Slaubaugh, over at this site, tracks things like who's been in how many issues. At the moment, Al Jaffee has been in the most with 437 issues and my partner Sergio Aragonés is first runner-up with 410. Al and Sergio, by the way, will both be Guests of Honor at this year's Comic-Con International and I'll doubtlessly be hosting a panel with the both of them, plus a few other longtime Mad contributors.

Ah, but what about consecutive appearances in the magazine? What about that? Mike tracks that over on this page where we see that at the moment, writer Dick DeBartolo has been in 384 consecutive issues (103-present) while Sergio has been in 375 consecutive issues (112-present). Try as he may, my amigo has been unable to pull into the lead. Every time he gets something in the magazine, so does Dick, probably for no other reason than to deny Sergio the lead. (We recently wrote about The DeBartolo Streak here…and I guess I shouldn't call it The DeBartolo Streak because that conjures up a very unpleasant mental image.)

Last night, I raised Sergio's hopes for naught. I haven't seen the current issue yet but Dave Mackey e-mailed me to say that Dick D. didn't seem to have an article in it. True, Dick is a Creative Consultant for the magazine but we don't count that. Besides, being a Creative Consultant for Mad is like being a Campaign Adviser for Fred Thompson. There seemed to be no actual article by DeBartolo in the issue but Sergio is in it. It says on the cover, "Not Assembled by Mexicans" but it doesn't say that one didn't write or draw a couple of pages and a batch of skinny cartoons in the margins.

I called Sergio and told him that instead of being nine issues behind Dick, he was now only eight. He was gleeful and I could hear him turning cartwheels and doing a Russian dance in celebration.

Later today though, I must dash those hopes I raised. This morn, Dave wrote me to note that on Dick DeBartolo's website, he says that in the latest issue — the one of which we speak — he "…wrote the bios of The Whitest Kids U' Know." Damn. Sorry, Sergio. But take consolation in the fact that most people think you have the better mustache.

I don't know why I'm mentioning this but the other night, Jay Leno had a segment on his show called "Doctors Tell Doctor Jokes." He brought out a number of actual doctors and they told doctor jokes. The first doctor who came out to tell a doctor joke was a gastroenterologist named Dr. Carey Strom who happens to be my gastroenterologist. I am pleased to report that he is better at performing an endoscopy than he is at telling a joke.

Scott Dunbier calls my attention to what may be the last chapter in the saga of Gary Coleman's pants.

On January 17, the auction ended with a winning bid of $400,000 placed by an eBay member named dfwgixxer. There were actually two bids for that price but dfwgixxer got his or her in first. Several other bidders went well into the six figure amounts.

So now, what did we think the odds were that anyone would actually pay $400, let alone a thousand times that amount for a pair of Mr. Coleman's old sweatpants? I'd say about the same as the chances of a grassroots "Mike Gravel for President" movement cinching the nomination for him.

It doesn't come as a huge surprise but on January 24, the pants seller posted the following negative feedback for dfwgixxer…

Scammer!!! NEVER RESPONDED!!! RISKY EBAYER!!! NON-BUYER!!!

What's funny, of course, is that the seller expected a response. Also, that despite this, dfwgixxer still has a 99.2% positive feedback score…and especially that eBay, which previously declared all six and seven figure bids "bogus bids" and cancelled them allowed this one to get to 400 grand. Like maybe that might be a real offer.

And one more stage appearance by Tony Curtis! (I hadn't meant for this to become a topic on the blog, honest. But if we're going to talk about it at all, let's exhaust the topic.) B. Baker writes to tell me…

Since you mention it, the actor's ill-fated stint in Simon's I Ought To Be In Pictures wasn't actually Tony Curtis' first attempt to crack B'way. In the early '70s, Curtis opened in Detroit in an odd Broadway-bound comedy first called Turtlenecks and later re-titled One Night Stand. The play, by Bruce Jay Friedman and Jacques Levy, was in a considerable state of flux during its Detroit run. The reviews were not kind, but to be fair, Mr. Curtis wasn't seen as the show's principal problem — the show's basic structure and lack of laughs were judged as faulty. The show, which also featured William Devane and the always welcome Sammy Smith, was closed by producer David Merrick in Philadelphia a month later before reaching NY; I'm not sure Curtis was still with the play by then.

You're probably always asking for trouble when you title a play One Night Stand.

I actually like Tony Curtis quite a bit. I saw him in the Neil Simon play before his meltdown and he was quite good in it. So was Dinah Manoff, who played his daughter. (I've always liked her, too. My first week on Welcome Back, Kotter, she had a very brief role — one or two lines — and she showed enough talent that there was talk of bringing her character back. They didn't but it was astounding that anyone noticed her at all, given how small her role was.)

Curtis was great, of course, in Some Like It Hot and films of that calibre. I always thought he showed his worth when he was cast, as he so often was, in something that would have been an utter turkey without him…like Houdini. It's not at its core a very good film but something about Curtis makes it sorta watchable. And I thought he was the best thing in The Great Race, though that isn't a huge compliment. We don't have a lot of that kind of movie star these days.

Several of you have reminded me that Tony Curtis made at least one other stage appearance. In 2002, he toured for a time in Sugar, the musical comedy adaptation of the movie that made him famous, Some Like It Hot. In this case, he didn't play his old role. He played Osgood Fielding III, the role Joe E. Brown had played in the film. As one person wrote me, "He got star billing even though he was only on stage about fifteen minutes." Since the script was already frozen, he only had to learn the role once.

And since we're talking about Tony Curtis, let's mention his memorable performance as Stoney Curtis in an episode of The Flintstones. A pretty good episode, I should say.

Earlier this week, I wrote a post about how the weather forecasters usually do a great job but, regarding the storms that have affected Southern California this past week, they didn't have much of a clue. The above radar map, which is from about fifteen minutes ago, is a good example of how capricious this can be. The red arrow, which I added, shows the approximate direction in which all this weather is moving.

We are presently under a Severe Thunderstorm Watch in Los Angeles — where at the moment, it isn't even drizzling, let alone thunderstorming. We had a lot of rain overnight (a lot for us) but it's been pretty much light showers for most of the day.

That's here. As you can see, there's been a ton of stormy weather moving through Long Beach and into the area just east of L.A. The red dots represent the most intense storms, the orange are close runners-up and the yellow is moderate rain. We have a little cell of possible light showers — indicated by the green — about to move through parts of L.A.

That Severe Thunderstorm Watch isn't wrong. It's just wrong for right this minute in right this area. The folks at the National Weather Service don't predict for your block and even if they did…well, take a look. A couple good gusts of wind and all those warm colored dots could have been over us here at the moment or even down in Oceanside. It's too much a crapshoot out there for them to know precisely where all this weather is going to go. We could still get lightning 'n' thunder later this evening.

People often moan that the forecasts are wrong, ignoring that the forecast was correct for most of the covered area. The N.W.S. and the private meteorologists do get it wrong, of course. They say it's going to rain and then there isn't a storm within a thousand miles of you. But sometimes — most of the time when the forecast seems to be wrong — what's happening is that the forecast is right for the area it covers. It just isn't right for the part of it that you're in at the moment.

We're fans here of the musical based on Al Capp's comic strip Li'l Abner and elsewhere on this site, you'll find articles that I wrote some time ago about that show as it played on Broadway and also as it was turned into a movie. I consider myself a bit of an expert on it, and have briefly been involved in some aborted attempts to revive it. Amazingly, though it was rather successful when it first played The Great White Way, and it's constantly produced around the country, it has yet to have a full-scale Broadway revival. Gypsy is about to have its seven-thousandth (or so it seems) but Abner has been represented on stages only by an endless stream of regional, college and high school productions.

Its popularity in those venues makes sense. It's a very easy show to mount. The costumes are mainly hillbilly garb and you can do most of them just by rummaging through a few closets or thrift shops. The sets can be pretty simple and cartoony. Most of the songs do not require great voices. The dances just have to be energetic. Most of the roles can be filled by college age performers. In fact, with a little make-up (and it doesn't have to be convincing), they can all be filled by college age performers. Also, the cast is very large and can be just about as large as you want it to be.

A large cast is a liability for a professional production where everyone must be paid but, as a director of such shows once explained to me, it's an asset at the Community College level. Since people aren't being paid or aren't being paid much, you might just cram that stage full of as many bodies as you can. It will be impressive and all those performers will get their friends and family to buy tickets.

But it's never been back to Broadway, though there have been talks and even options. One such attempt I know of was some time ago. Elliott Caplin, brother of Al Capp and manager of some of the Capp estate's affairs, helped me with my articles and it led to a casual friendship by telephone. Soon after, he called to see if I'd be interested in helping revise/update the book for a producer who was trying to arrange a new Broadway production. In ways that I did not fully understand and probably never will, Tony Curtis was somehow involved. I'm not sure if he was a producer or what but the effort seemed to revolve around him, which struck me as very odd.

Mr. Curtis was great in many movies but his total experience on the legit stage, as far as I know, was confined to one disastrous experience starring briefly in the debut of Neil Simon's play, You Oughta Be in Pictures. As the story is told, Simon cast Curtis, who'd never done a play before and never had to really memorize any more lines than was necessary for one day's filming of a movie or TV show. With enormous effort and insecurity, he learned the role in the new play for an outta-town tryout in Los Angeles and did well on opening night. Then Mr. Simon began rewriting (as playwrights always do on a new play) and Curtis couldn't unlearn the old lines and learn the new, at least not as rapidly as was necessary. He wound up exploding in the middle of one performance, unleashing a torrent of vulgar ad-libs, then getting dressed and going home at intermission, leaving a puzzled audience in the hands of an understudy who didn't know the lines, either. Ron Leibman eventually took over the lead and played it in New York.

Elliott Caplin told me that Curtis, despite the above — and also the fact that he's not exactly a singer and this is a musical — would appear in the proposed revival of Li'l Abner. I asked, of course, "In what part?" "Well," he said, "That's what they haven't figured out yet." I'm not sure of all that it takes to get a show up and running on Broadway, but I would think that deciding what role your star will play is high on the list. Elliott continued, "I think they're figuring that he'd play a lot of non-singing cameo roles, like the Mayor or the Newscaster." It all sounded quite unlikely so I told Elliott that if the deal did proceed, of course I was interested, but I'd bet him a thousand dollars it would never happen. Being a smart guy, Elliott declined the wager and then passed away before I could even call him for an "I told you so." (A few years later, I met Tony Curtis, asked him about it and he did not seem to ever have heard of Li'l Abner or, for that matter, Broadway.)

Later on, another producer — one with some actual credits in this area — contacted me about participating in a revival. Again, I was interested and again, the deal fell through. This guy couldn't even get together enough funding and elements to obtain an option. In 1998, the Encores group that mounts "staged readings" (actually, stripped-down productions) at New York's City Center did a four-performance revival which I attended and which was quite wonderful. There was some brief talk that it might morph into a full-scale production — the City Center version of Chicago did and is still running — but Abner Yokum wasn't so fortunate.

Opening this week in Los Angeles is another stripped-down production. The Reprise! group, which stages wonderful shows up at U.C.L.A., is doing Li'l Abner with a preview performance on February 5 and a grand opening on the sixth. The show runs through February 17 and stars Eric Martsolf as Abner, Brandi Burkhardt as Daisy Mae, Michael Kostroff as Marryin' Sam, Cathy Rigby as Mammy Yokum (which probably means Mammy will be turning backflips), Robert Towers as Pappy Yokum and Fred Willard (!) as General Bullmoose. Fred Willard is an intriguing choice for that role and I'll bet Kostroff will be superb.

I have nothing to do with this production other than helping its publicists with a little history, but I'll be there and all indicators are that it'll do the show justice. Here's a link to an article with a full cast list and some photos. I believe tickets are becoming scarce but if you'd like to try and score a few, this link should do it. If you'd like to wait until I see the show and post a review, that's of course your right but don't be surprised if the entire run is sold out by then.

Costco is a great place to shop but not on a Saturday.

Rumors during the current Writers Strike have been about as reliable as rumors in past strikes. They're spreading faster, thanks to the increased presence of the Internet, but they're not getting any more reliable. About a third turn out to be true, about a third have some nugget of truth in them, and the rest are utter swamp gas. In show business — and I presume it's like this to some extent in most fields — people don't like to admit that they're out of the loop and don't have the kind of great insider connections that give them instant word on all the secret goings-on. So they pass on and amplify rumors, no matter what the source, and sometimes just make things up.

In the '81 strike (I think it was…they all run together), a writing team I know decided to invent a few rumors and pass them around, just to see what kind of life they'd have. One I recall was that the lead negotiators for both sides had taken the night off, gone to dinner separately…but found themselves by coincidence in the same restaurant, sitting at adjoining tables. This had not happened. The writing team just invented it from the whole cloth and told a few (just a few) people. To their amazement, the tale came back to them from a number of sources, some of whom had added details and embellishments, including a bit of food-throwing by the lead negotiators and even the name of the restaurant where it had allegedly occurred. One person said he'd heard it from someone who was there at the time and had witnessed the whole thing.

It helps to remember that sometimes there's no truth whatsoever in a rumor. Zero. It doesn't come from anyone in a position to know. It also helps to remember that it's not unprecedented for one side to plant a rumor that they think may sway public opinion and put more pressure on the other side.

At the moment, the grapevine has it that informal talks in the WGA Strike are going quite well and that may be so. I mean, this one sounds likely. Informal talks often go well because they're conducted in a friendlier atmosphere. The participants are less worried that they're about to agree to something foolish and permanent. After all, they still have the formal talks to act as a kind of fail-safe stage wherein they can dance away from something agreed-to in the informal chats.

Also, of course, it is not uncommon to use the informal talks to soften up one's opponent, lulling them into the mindset that all is well, that the end is in sight and that the formal talks are just…well, a formality. Then at the last second, you toss in a hand grenade — some small but potent loophole or demand that favors your side — in the hope that the other side is so emotionally committed to this being the end that they won't put up a fuss. A lawyer once told me that he was always wary of what was said on the way out of a negotiation…

You have your briefcase packed and your coat on and your car keys in your hand. You're thinking, "Well, that's finally over" and you're trying to decide where to stop and pick up a pizza on the way home. That's when, ever so casually, the other side mentions, "Don't you worry…we'll draw up all the paperwork and we'll make sure we include that language about revenues from Brazil." Sometimes, you're so weary and eager to get home, you let it slide. And sometimes, you're home and eating pizza with anchovies by the time you realize, "Hey, we never agreed to anything about revenues from Brazil!"

Stuff like that. So when you hear that they have "an agreement in principle" or that "they just have to put it on paper" or "it's for all intents and purposes, a done deal," be wary. At that stage, the agreement could still explode…and sometimes doesn't but should. And maybe the report wasn't even true in the first place.

None of this is meant to suggest that I think we're close to that phase or that the current rumors are surely wrong. I still believe the strike will be over sooner rather than later, and that the studios want to get it over in the next few weeks so they can get some production done before the expiration of the Screen Actors Guild deal at the end of June. But wanting to end one of these and actually doing so are two separate matters, especially if the core member companies of the AMPTP are not precisely on the same page with it all. Do yourself a favor and stay off the emotional roller coaster of getting your hopes up with every unofficial report. We probably have another couple of big "downs" before this one is settled…and the rumors that trigger the "ups" may not even be accurate.