Monthly Archives: May 2008

My buddy Paul Harris is a great broadcaster who's currently between gigs but never mind that. I found this story through his weblog and I think everyone oughta go read it. You'll see why.

The Las Vegas production of Spamalot — which as you may recall, I didn't think was very good — is closing July 13. That's a little more than a year after it opened and that's probably a big disappointment to the folks behind it. It's also a disappointment to those of us who've watched one Broadway-type show after another not do well in Vegas. Mamma Mia is still running and so is the Vegas remodel of Phantom of the Opera, but pretty much everything else has crashed 'n' burned. Jersey Boys opened there last night and we'll see how that one does.

In the past, I've suggested that one of the problems is that people who want to see Broadway shows don't want to see the truncated versions that Vegas offers. That may drive off a few patrons and the quality of some productions may keep others away. But the more I think about it, the more I think there's more to it than that. Maybe people who visit Las Vegas have so many other options…and a yearning to do the things one can only do in Vegas. I'm going to think about this some more and write a piece here one of these days about it.

From Alex Pascover…

I'm sure I'm about the hundredth person to email you about this, but I wanted to comment on your post regarding the presidential vs. congressional disapproval numbers. First, I'm not sure it's correct that as many people disapprove of Congress as Bush (as opposed to people who simply do not approve), but maybe it's so. Regardless, the disapproval of Congress is bifurcated — there are those who disapprove of Congress from the right; there are many more of us who disapprove of Congress from the left because they haven't acted decisively enough to end the war or implement the (progressive) domestic policy proposals that swept them into office. (Of course, this is overwhelmingly laid at the feet of Senate Republicans who have filibustered literally every single piece of domestic legislation this year, but poor press coverage of what's happening in Congress means that this is not widely understood.) That's not the case with the president — most everybody hates him for about the same reasons.

Moreover, disapproval of the president means something much more significant than disapproval of Congress simply because he's a single person. You can disapprove of Congress as a whole still liking your representatives — indeed, that's the case for most people. And it's why most members get re-elected. (Unlike you, I don't think this is a bad thing, although it will be better a year from now when the Democrats' margin in the Senate and a friendly president will make the GOP intransigence unsustainable.) But that doesn't make sense with the president, where the man and the institution are the same guy. For this reason, the measurement scales are way off — Bush's unpopularty numbers are historic. Congressional unpopularity — even if the numbers are the same — is just high; it's nothing like a record. And that's because these institutional reasons put a lot of downward pressure on Congressional approval numbers and a lot of upward pressure on the president's in any situation. It's astounding that Bush is so unpopular that he's managed to overcome the significant positive bias in these kinds of polls for a president.

Obviously, these numbers would make more of a difference if Bush were running again, but as you said, McCain is basically running for the a third Bush term (except, mind-bogglingly, with even an less consistent policy agenda), so it still has some predictive value.

Yeah…I think McCain's current popularity is because people keep hearing the word "maverick" and not realizing that his most recent pledges are essentially to do everything Bush has done wrong except to do more of it. There's also a great personal affection for McCain. He's charming at times and funny and a genuine American hero, even if he can't currently bring himself to actually vote against the torturing of others. I expect the nation's view of him to change before November, especially if he keeps having these "senior moments" that are causing even some who like him to wonder if he's up to the job. The way it seems to be going is that on odd-numbered days, he says something painfully honest and damning to his own stated platform and then on even-numbered days, he goes out and "clarifies" that he meant something else.

But you're right. People on the right don't like Congress because it's controlled by Democrats and it keeps refusing to do what Bush wants. People on the left don't like it because it isn't actively undoing much of what Bush has done. Folks in the middle look at all that gridlocking and political tap-dancing and just moan at what an inefficient body we have there. I think the knee-jerk tendency to return all those people to office is a bad thing but you're right. We hate Congress as a whole and often love our own reps. I'm very happy with my Congressguy, Henry Waxman; not so thrilled with either of California's senators.

I am not, by the way, in favor of term limits for any office. I think that if we want to elect the same person over and over until they drop, we should be able to do it. I just think we shouldn't do it as often as we do already.

It's not looking good for the Screen Actors Guild in its negotiation with the AMPTP. The talks have been extended but every word leaking from within says that the studios are trying to force SAG to accept some version of the deal already made with the DGA, WGA and other unions. And SAG is saying, in effect, "That deal — and your version of it, in particular — doesn't work for us."

I haven't been following this one as closely as I followed the WGA negotiations. I don't have any real sources within SAG calling me. But from all I read, the operating assumption is that SAG will have to either take a deal it abhors or begin making picket signs. In the meantime, the AMPTP will soon be sitting down with AFTRA, the other actors' union, and everyone seems to think AFTRA will take darn near whatever the studios offer. This would further undermine the SAG position and create a lot of ill will between the two unions.

Twice in the last half-dozen years, there were proposals that came close to merging SAG and AFTRA into one big union that probably would have been stronger than the sum of its parts. Each time, the leaderships of both unions endorsed the proposal. Each time, it was then necessary to get a 60% vote of the memberships to consolidate. Each time, the AFTRA side voted overwhemingly in favor. And each time, the SAG side fell a bit short. The SAG vote was 52% in 1999 and 57.8% in 2003.

What will happen next time they talk of merger? Your guess is as good as mine. The current situation probably makes the SAG members who voted against the alliance regret that vote. But depending on how things roll out, the two unions may not speak to each other for years.

Without knowing the terms on the table, I think it's safe to assume that SAG is presently being slammed by the old Pattern Bargaining trick…a longtime fave of the AMPTP. The idea is to craft proposals in a form that works for Union A and not for Union B. Then after Union A accepts, you try to force the same deal on B as a done deal, a precedent of how business must henceforth be done. In this case, SAG has the added pressure of knowing that AFTRA will probably accept the pattern…so SAG negotiators are being boxed-in from all sides.

I'll stand by my previous prediction, which is that there won't be a SAG strike but it's going to come awfully close and look very likely. Despite all this, SAG still has a lot of clout. A strike — even a short one — would hurt the studios a lot. For that matter, it will hurt the studios if this thing goes down to the wire, to the expiration date of the current SAG contract, which is June 30. There a lot of movies that are prepped to shoot soon but won't as long as there's the possibility of that walkout. In a sense, the SAG strike is on now because a lot of projects are being scrubbed or postponed.

More news when there's more news.

I'm not sure what I'm doing up at this hour, either. I should tell the students in my class that the advantage of writing comedy material at five in the morning is also the disadvantage: Everything seems funny.

In another life when I was working on Welcome Back, Kotter, my partner Dennis and I would sometimes be at the studio or at Gabe Kaplan's house 'til five or thereabouts in the ayem, trying with occasional success to rewrite that week's script into something worthy of videotape. The hours were especially rough on Mr. Kaplan when he participated in the rewrite, as he often did. Unless it was Friday night, he had to be at the studio at 10 AM to rehearse what we were writing. The rest of us could straggle in a bit later.

This was before Internet or computers or fax machines. If a page of the script needed a major redo, we'd type a new page on a thing called a typewriter. If we just had to change a line or three, we'd handwrite it in on the appropriate page of the previous draft. I usually did this because I had the neatest handwriting. Then when we were close to done, I'd phone the script service — a company that charged and got a fortune for executing the following tasks. As we left, I'd leave the revised script in an envelope either with the guard at the studio gate or if we were working at Gabe's house, on his doorstep. The script service would send a runner to pick it up and he'd take it back to their office where a squadron (I assume) would retype the whole thing, sometimes for Xeroxing but sometimes for mimeographing, a reproduction process that was becoming largely Flintstonian in the seventies. On the front of the script, there'd be a note with the phone number of one of the participating writers — usually, me — so they could call if they had a question. It was understood that they were to do this only in the most desperate of circumstances.

I'd drive home and get whatever sleep was still possible. While I was doing this, the script service would be mass copying the scripts. If it was a Saturday morn when I awoke, there'd be a copy of the revised draft on my doorstep, just as everyone who worked on the show would be finding one on theirs. If it was a weekday, there'd be a crate of copies at the studio when everyone arrived. It never seemed humanly possible but it was always done.

One night, we were at Gabe's 'til about five…and we were not only rehearsing but taping later that day. It was us, Gabe, a producer and one other story editor and we were all punchy. To amuse ourselves, and maybe to send out a cry that we were working this hard, we began inserting obscene stage directions. One of the milder ones was something like, "Mr. Woodman enters the classroom and begins french kissing all the male students." Others would have made Larry Flynt blush.

Now, understand that we were not suggesting that any of this would actually be performed on the ABC Television Network, especially during the Family Hour. It was just there to amuse us and the cast and the staff, and everyone was highly amused. Everyone except the Standards and Practices lady — i.e., The Network Censor. She insisted that the scripts be collected, destroyed and reissued with proper stage directions. We suggested that she had no jurisdiction to demand this. She could rule on what we proposed to put on the air but not on our stage directions.

I'm not sure why the producer stuck to his guns on this one for even a few hours…we'd already gotten our laugh from the crew. Eventually, he took pity on the Censor Lady, who was honestly concerned that we'd cost her her job. Near the end, she was arguing that though the scripts were just for us, they did have a way of leaking out and being sold and even studied in classrooms. I rewrote all the offending stage directions.

That night, just before taping, I was backstage and John Sylvester White, who played Mr. Woodman, came up to me. John was a lovely little man with a wicked sense of humor but before each taping, he suffered a brief panic attack. Everyone had to assure him that he'd be fine, that the audience would love him, that we'd given him all the best lines in the show. (All of that was true.) I gave him the customary reassurance and he headed for the stage. But before he went, he turned to me and said, "Hey, remind me. Which is the scene where I french kiss all the male students?"

Good night, Internet. See you in the morning.

I haven't mentioned it lately here but I'm still teaching once a week in the Master of Professional Writing program down at USC. The course is called "Writing Humor: Literary and Dramatic." Next week is the last class of the Spring semester and I'm making it easy on myself by bringing in a guest speaker…a superior writer friend of mine named Treva Silverman, who wrote for The Monkees and The Mary Tyler Moore Show and many other things including a number of successful movies for which others got the screen credit. Earlier this term, I had in two other guest speakers…Marvin Silbermintz (who writes for that Leno guy on The Tonight Show) and the most brilliant comic actor on this planet, Chuck McCann.

Other weeks, it's just me, telling my charges whatever I think I know about comedy writing, critiquing their homework assignments, etc. Some weeks, we watch and analyze funny movies, TV shows or comedy routines. We did one week on Laurel and Hardy, one week on The Dick Van Dyke Show, one week on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, etc. For one class, I brought in hundreds of Henny Youngman jokes and we just sat around and took turns reading them out loud and discussing why the ones that made us laugh made us laugh and why the ones that didn't didn't.

Before I started, someone else who'd done this kind of thing gave me advice I haven't been able to use. He said that the greatest good I could do my students would be to discourage the ones who aren't funny and will never be funny and need to know that they can never make a dollar in that line o' work. I guess that's true but I didn't have anyone this term who needed that kind of attitude adjustment. Maybe next year.

Yeah, I've decided to keep on doing this. I'll be teaching Funny again during the Fall quarter, and I think the class is already full or close to full. (They even have a profile of me over on their faculty page.) I dunno what the students are getting out of it apart from becoming overly familiar with Henny Youngman's act…but I'm sure learning a lot.

As we've noted here, a long and expensive prosecution of comic book retailer Gordon Lee finally ended recently with all charges being dismissed. It was costly for the city of Rome, Georgia to put Lee on trial and costly for Lee and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund to get the case tossed outta court, where it never should have been in the first place.

When a prosecutor loses a case, it doesn't automatically mean that they were wrong to press it in the first place but there are also Bad Faith prosecutions, and cases where the "corrective" is grossly out of proportion to the alleged crime. Did Leigh Patterson, the Floyd County district attorney who pushed this matter and kept it going so long and with so many examples of prosecutorial misconduct, actually believe she was punishing a genuine wrong? If so, she was wrong.

But it seems likely that she was even wronger than that; that she knew it was a trivial matter, unworthy of the courts, and went forward because it seemed like an easy win, a way to beat up on a little guy who — had the CBLDF not come to his aid — would not have been able to mount much of a defense.

Prosecutors like to go after putative pornographers, especially when they can claim to be protecting children. Those are generally easy cases to win — a lot simpler than corporate crime or peddling illegal weaponry or even most crimes of violence — but you have to pick your targets carefully. In most cities, one can view X-rated movies on the in-room TV sets at the Marriott or Hyatt or Holiday Inn, and surely minors occasionally catch a glimpse or two. But no one ever prosecutes the Marriott. The Marriott has money. You can see lots of dirty movies on DirecTV, and kids do on occasion, but no one suggests handcuffing John Malone, chairman of the company that owns DirecTV. Why? Because John Malone has a couple billion dollars with which to hire good lawyers. It's a lot easier to go after someone like Gordon Lee who, had it not been for the CBLDF, would not have much of a defense.

In this editorial, the hometown newspaper of Gordon Lee and Leigh Patterson laments what a case like this does to the image of their city and adds, "The only true offense has been to the sensibilities of local taxpayers." They're right, and we shouldn't let the fact that Mr. Lee is free mean that this case can be forgotten. Because tomorrow, some other prosecutor will be looking for a quick victory as the protector of the tiny tots. And that prosecutor will go after someone else they think can't fight back.

Danton Burroughs — the grandson of Edgar Rice Burroughs and a major force in keeping that man's work alive — left us Wednesday evening at the age of 64. He had been suffering from Parkinson's Disease for some time and died at his home in Tarzana, a suburb named for his grandfather's legendary creation. He was the son of John Coleman Burroughs, who was himself distinguished in the arts as a photographer and illustrator.

I worked several times for and with the Burroughs estate, writing and/or editing comic books of Tarzan and Korak. I wish I could say that Danton and I always got along but we often clashed and of course, since he was who he was, he usually (maybe always) got his way. But I always respected his passion for the family legacy and not just because there was a good living to be made from it. He was genuinely dedicated to that legacy for all the best reasons and if you do a little Googling, you'll find dozens of websites that attest to his generosity in perpetuating the work of his pa and grandpa, and sharing it all with the world.

Thanks to Jim Van Hise for sending me the sad news so I could share it with you here.

Russ Maheras writes…

I can't figure out why Democrats gloat so much about Bush's disapproval ratings. Democrats control both the House and the Senate, and their ratings are worse than Bush's.

Democrats gloat about as much about Bush's disapproval ratings as Republicans do when it's a Democrat whose numbers are in the commode. In this case, it's vindication, it's a big "I told you so," it's a big slap at all those who told us that the war would pay for itself, there were weapons of mass destruction, tax cuts for the rich would help the lower class, it was "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, etc. No one in politics ever misses an opportunity to do a happy dance when the other side is losing big.

The difference between a low approval rating for Congress and one for Bush is that the latter affects the upcoming election. True, Bush isn't running but a guy who advocates many (most?) of his policies is. Come October, will John McCain still be defending all those Bush decisions that even diehard Republicans now regret? Or to distance himself from the guy with the (by then) 75%+ disapproval rating, will McCain be sounding like Keith Olbermann trashing the Bush administration? My own guess is that once McCain has locked up the nomination, gotten what he can get in campaign contributions from the extreme right and dodged the threat of a significant "third party" Conservative draining votes from him, we're going to see McCain move sharply to the left.

Either that or we're going to see that photo of him hugging George W. more often that we saw the one of Britney Spears minus her undies.

In the meantime, America may disapprove of the current Congress but they're going to vote to re-elect 95% of it. I don't like it either but they always do.

At this moment, a nice article about Jack Kirby (and my book about him) is one of the top stories over on the CNN homepage. It's by Todd Leopold and I thank him for it.

Also, I fixed a couple of broken links in this post which directed you to some of what others have written about Kirby: King of Comics.