Monthly Archives: May 2008

If I don't post a lot this week, it's because I'm busy with about nineteen things…mostly scripts that are due but also an enormous headache involving no less than three telephone companies. This means three different firms I must phone (repeatedly!) and wade through clumsy robotic operators who attempt to direct my call. The problem, of course, is that my problem doesn't fit any of the standard categories and departments…so the robots can't figure out where to direct me and, frankly, the occasional humans I reach aren't doing such a great job of it.

Let me see if I can explain this because it's a bit complicated. Both my mother and I, independent of one another, decided to transfer phone service from non-digital companies to the digital (and cheaper) phone service of Time-Warner Cable. Phone numbers did not change…just the companies supplying our service and, of course, what we were paying.

She went from Verizon to Time-Warner. I went from A.T. and T. to Time-Warner. In neither case has the Time-Warner option worked well for us. At her house, it would only work on one phone. The installer finally gave up on trying to get the extension in her bedroom to work and just said, "I can't do it." It seemed like a simple, garden-variety extension such as you find in 98% of the homes in this country but somehow, he couldn't get it connected.

Now, you might wonder why, at that point, we didn't just tell the guy to forget about it and stay with Verizon. Well, you really can't. It takes 6-10 days for a number to be transferred from one company to another. The day the installer arrived at my mother's house was the day Time-Warner got custody of her number. If we'd told him that day to not do the installation, the number would not have stayed with Verizon. It would have taken those 6-10 days to switch it back and then we would have had to get a Verizon installer out to reconnect it…and my mother would have been without a phone for all that time. So we kinda had to stay with Time-Warner, at least for a while, and she had to do without the extension in her bedroom.

Then a few days later, another problem was noticed. My mother has a personal alarm system — one of those little buttons that the elderly sometimes wear to summon help in an emergency. I call it her "I've fallen and I can't get up" button but it isn't from that company. (If you need to get one of those devices for someone, by the way, shop around. There are plenty of better, cheaper systems.)

The machine is supposed to interface with her phone system and it did when she had Verizon. Time-Warner assured us it would work fine with their lines and that turned out not to be so. So all of a sudden, my mother had this emergency distress alarm that wasn't connected to anything. Fat lot of good that would do her. I made the necessary calls to switch her back to Verizon and this involved more calls and explanations and being put on hold and/or routed about than you could imagine. I still can't get Time-Warner over there to rip out their lines but the Verizon service has been reconnected and everything works like it did before.

In the meantime, we were lucky that I'd already arranged to get her one of these. You may remember a little while ago that I asked here if someone could recommend a good emergency-type cell phone for seniors. Many of you suggested the Jitterbug and now she has one, thank you. Seems to work just as advertised…and I'm getting to be so glad and delightfully surprised when anything does.

My problem is a little easier to explain. As soon as my phone was shifted over to Time-Warner, it became incapable of calling her. I can call my mother on my cell phone. I can call her on another phone line I have that is still with A.T. and T. But I can't call her now on my main phone, which is Time-Warner digital. From my end, it just rings and rings and rings as if she's just not answering. On her end, it does not ring at all, and I have to assume this will be the case with others I phone. I mean, it can't be that by some fluke of electronics, my phone can only reach people who did not give birth to me.

Can this problem be fixed soon? I'm starting to think not. Time-Warner's technicians say they should be able to figure it out but they need me to get her phone company, Verizon, to run all sorts of tests and to supply all sorts of data. Verizon is saying, in effect, "Our lines work fine. The problem is on Time-Warner's end so don't bother us." Looks like a stalemate. I'm going to give them a few more days to solve it but I'm not optimistic. Again, it's going to take a while and be messy to switch back from Time-Warner digital to A.T. and T. (or someone else) non-digital.

Among the frustrating things is that digital phone service is cheaper and once they get the bugs out of it, I'm sure it'll be what everyone has. It just isn't working now for either me or my mother and the transfer process is clumsy and time-consuming. So consider this a cautionary note: If you're seeing those ads about unlimited local and long distance for under thirty bucks a month and saying "That's for me," well, it may not be as ideal as it sounds. Or as simple to undo if it doesn't work as advertised.

The Tony nominations are out and there are some surprises, not so much in what was nominated but in what wasn't. The folks behind Young Frankenstein are probably open-mouthed with amazement. The show got but three — one for scenic design, two for supporting actors. No nod for Best Musical or Best Score or Best Book or the leads…all those categories where the previous Mel Brooks musical swept. I didn't see most of the other contenders and it's quite possible they were all superior…but it also sounds like someone in the Broadway community felt Young Frankenstein deserved a public spanking instead of the possible box office assist.

Still, its three nominations were three more than the new revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof got…and The Little Mermaid didn't fare so well, either. The stage version of the Disney cartoon received only two — one for Best Score and one for lighting. I guess that means no number on the Tony telecast, just as there probably won't be one from Young Frankenstein.

November, which I saw and liked a lot, got a single nomination — for Laurie Metcalf's fine performance. That probably means it will close when Nathan Lane departs in July.

I'm pleased that Xanadu, which I saw and liked a lot, is up for Best Musical, as is its star Kerri Butler for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical…and a little surprised that its fine supporting cast, especially Jackie Hoffman, was overlooked.

All in all, it's an odd list…and one that will probably make for an especially low-rated Tony Awards broadcast. I don't see a single category in which many people will have any sort of rooting interest or where, as sometimes happens, a certain "win" will represent some sort of important statement. The most interesting announcement was that a special Lifetime Achievement Tony will be presented to Stephen Sondheim, which will probably allow them to do some big, star-studded medley of important Sondheim numbers.

And I think that's all I have to say about the nominations. Just that it's an odd list.

Anyone here see Douglas Feith on The Daily Show just now? I'll embed a clip when one's available but it was an amazing discussion. Feith was one of the main architects/boosters of the Iraq War in the Bush administration and even some folks on his side have been known to refer to him as "the stupidest man in Washington." Even leaving aside Iraq, for him to go on that show and think he could hold his own in an interview with Jon Stewart suggests that the insult is not far off the mark.

Feith is pushing a book and in it (and in interviews now), he says that there were an awful lot of mistakes made by the war's planners. I can remember a time not so long ago when if you said that on a blog, you got angry e-mails from people accusing you of hating the troops and longing to kiss the tush of Saddam Hussein, you traitor. And now here we have Doug Feith, who was the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy during the invasion, essentially throwing his fellow planners under the proverbial bus. He's reduced to saying — this is a quote — "Errors are not lies."

He's right, of course, but errors are also not to be easily dismissed when thousands of people die because of them. Not when they reach the level where even Feith has to own up to them and try to get the public to view them as well-intentioned.

The guest chair on The Daily Show is becoming the single best way to sell a book these days. A publishing exec I encountered while promoting mine told me, "There's nothing like it. Just watch the ranking on Amazon before and after some author you never heard of before appears with Jon Stewart." So maybe it was worth it for Mr. Feith to make the appearance, or maybe he has some macho thing about walking into enemy territory. But I thought Stewart, with great charm and manners, confronted him in a way that the mainstream press does not confront these people…and Feith's responses were childish.

If you can catch the interview, do. Stewart said at the end that it was edited and that the entire discussion was up on the website. It's not yet there but when it is, I'll either link to it or embed it.

Bothered by Spam? I may have a solution for you: GMail. You know GMail…the free online mail service run by, as everything in the Universe will someday be, the people at Google.

I've mentioned GMail here before but with reservations. Its Spam filter wasn't the greatest, I thought. I routed duplicates of some of my incoming mail through GMail for a time and it was letting an awful lot of Cialis ads through while flagging almost any message that came from somebody in the comic book industry as a probable scam. There's a lesson in there.

They seem to have improved it. A few weeks ago, just as a test, I set my normal e-mail address to route duplicate copies into a GMail address and then, after a while, I went to check. There were about a thousand messages in my box there — about 600 correctly identified as Spam and moved into the Spam folder for easy deletion. There were only three false I.D.s of legit mail as Spam and all three were mass mailings from washingtonpost.com. Another lesson.

I had about a dozen unwanted e-mails identified as Kosher but that's not bad, given the volume. No Spam filtering method is going to bat a thousand…and you wouldn't want that. You'd want it to err on the side of not labelling an arguable message as junk mail.

So how can this help you? You have a primary e-mail address that everyone knows. It's probably pretty easy for you to set that address up to forward to another address. So you get a Gmail address and set that primary address to forward to the Gmail one. Then you pick your messages up from the Gmail address, where almost all the Spam will be tidily diverted into the Spam folder. You can log into Gmail and read and answer your desired messages online there…or if you're using an offline reader like Outlook or Eudora or Agent, you set the offline reader to pick your mail up from the Gmail address.

If you do the latter, you might want to log in to the Gmail address every week or so and quickly scan the headers in the Spam folder, just to make sure there's nothing getting in there that you want. If some friend's messages keep winding up in there amongst the Nigerian banking proposals, you add that friend to the Gmail address book and his messages will not be diverted any longer.

Because of this site, I get a lot of Spam — some weeks, upwards of 20,000 pieces. I tried a number of Spam filters, some of them quite pricey. The Gmail method is free and does a better job than any of them…which is not to suggest it's perfect. Just better than any alternative I've tried.

It is, sad to say, all over the Internet this morning that Gene Colan is not well. Gene is, of course, the great comic artist who did so much work for Marvel in the sixties and seventies on strips including (but hardly limited to) Iron Man, Daredevil, Howard the Duck, Sub-Mariner, Tomb of Dracula, Doctor Strange and Captain America. In his 60+ years in comics, he worked for other publishers as well, always maintaining the highest standards of craft and sheer professionalism. That his work has brought so much pleasure to so many would be reason enough to lament his ill health, and for us all to link arms over the Internet and pray for his recovery.

Just as good a reason is Gene himself. He and his wonderful wife Adrienne are two of the nicest people you could ever want to meet…as anyone who has met them can attest. When they are at a convention, there's always a mutual two-way love fest: Gene's fans line up to tell the both of them how much his work has meant to them…and Adrienne and Gene reciprocate. That love has meant so much to them that they can't help returning the favor. With some of comics' greats, I feel I have to convince them of what they've achieved, of how widespread their influence has been. Not with Gene. He's been to the cons. He's been mobbed by his adoring public. He knows.

Which doesn't mean I can't say it anyway. Gene Colan did so much good work in comics that some of us, I fear, took him for granted. Every month for decades, there were two, sometimes three Colan-drawn books on the racks. We kinda got to expect comics to look that good because of Gene. But I can recall when he started drawing super-heroes for Marvel in the sixties. I can recall how revolutionary and world-changing that early work was.

What Gene had done in comics prior to that was, of course, exceptional. But there was a day in the sixties — the day Tales to Astonish #70 featuring his first Sub-Mariner assignment came out — when he became one of the truly exciting, innovative stylists of the American comic book. And from there on, it just got better and better.

I don't know what else to write here. It just seems appropriate to send a whole lotta love the Colans' way this morning. I hope the dire reports on his health will prove to be overstated. I hope we'll have Gene around for many more years. I hope — and of this, I am the surest — that Gene is well aware how many fans he has and how, whenever he goes, he's leaving behind an incredible body of work that will be praised and studied and appreciated by comic book fans who aren't even born yet. I just think we oughta postpone losing a guy like that as long as possible.

Randy Skretvedt knows more about Laurel and Hardy than I do…and since I know a lot, that should give you some idea how much he knows. He sent the following note. For those not in the know, Oliver Hardy's nickname was Babe. In fact, he was billed as Oliver "Babe" Hardy or even Babe Hardy in some of his early, pre-Laurel films.

Regarding L&H's appearance on This Is Your Life, Babe Hardy's widow Lucille told me that the reason for the lengthy delay was that a tire blew out on the car taking them from the Knickerbocker hotel to the NBC studios, and that they had to walk there — which, given Babe's considerable bulk, took a while.

Stan's displeasure with the show seems to have taken root afterwards, when he viewed the 16mm print given him. He wrote in letters to fans afterward that he thought a lot of the really important people in their stories weren't on the show (Hal Roach, for one!), and that doing two lives in one half-hour meant that neither man's story was told fully enough. As for their being tight-lipped during the broadcast, Stan was concerned about making his television debut, live and coast-to-coast, in this unrehearsed surprise. Babe is much more comfortable in front of the live cameras than Stan, and we get to see his gentlemanly offscreen personality; my favorite moment comes after one of his childhood girlfriends bids her goodbye, and Babe says to Ralph Edwards, "She's still beautiful!"

Well, it's obvious Stan wasn't thrilled with the whole event. Do we have any idea why Hal Roach wasn't on the show? Or any of about two dozen of those important folks who were still alive at the time? Hal's son is on the show and that suggests to me that Senior may have been asked but declined.

It's really a fascinating bit of film, that whole episode is…certainly the only time most people ever saw Laurel and Hardy out of character. It's also a rare bit of evidence as to their popularity. The reaction of the live audience when the identity of the guests of honor is the best part.

Not to question Lucille Hardy but I'm a little puzzled by this story about the flat tire. The Knickerbocker Hotel, where Stan and Ollie were surprised, was (and still is) at 1714 Ivar Ave. in Hollywood. It's now a pretty dingy-looking retirement home. This is Your Life was done in later years from the Pantages on Hollywood near Vine but on December 1, 1954 when Laurel and Hardy were shanghaied onto it, I'm pretty sure it was at the theater at 1735 N. Vine Street which was known over the years as the El Capitan, the Jerry Lewis Theater, the Hollywood Palace and many other names. It's now a nightclub called The Avalon.

It was the El Capitan in '54 and if you went out a rear door of the Knickerbocker, you'd be no more than about fifty yards max from the rear of the El Capitan, which is presumably where the stage door entrance was located. The two buildings are practically back to back on the same block. I'm not sure why there'd be a car involved or how it could have gotten them there quicker or with less walking than merely walking there. Perhaps there was some sort of fence there that required they be taken the long way around? What am I missing here?

Down at Epcot in Florida, there's a great attraction called "Journey Into Imagination" that is much loved by visitors. It opened in 1983 and like many facets of the Disney theme parks, it's been through a couple of incarnations and revamps over the years. Before '99, its star was a colorful gent named the Dreamfinder who celebrated the wonders of human imagination and taught his little friend, Figment.

I've seen films of the Dreamfinder but by the time I first went to Epcot, he was gone. He was ousted in 1999 when the show was retooled and his replacement was a character named Dr. Nigel Channing, who was voiced by Eric Idle. In 2002, the show was refurbished again, this time playing up Figment's role. (Figment's voice was by now assumed by Muppeteer Supreme Dave Goelz, who took over the role from the late Billy Barty.)

For years, theme park buffs have pilloried and petitioned the Disney organization to bring back the Dreamfinder. He was a much-loved character who combined the whimsy of The Wizard of Oz (as per the movie version) with the boundless spirit of the man who provided the Dreamfinder's voice, Chuck McCann.

You've seen me mention my pal Chuck here many times but I don't think I've made clear what a truly astounding, gifted individual he is. Chuck is an actor and a writer and a puppeteer and a director and to just be around him is to feel the magic. He truly is the Dreamfinder, and I don't mean just because he did the voice. I mean he really is that character, and everything that was wonderful about it is something that is wonderful about Chuck.

Rumor has it that all the lobbying by the fans has not been without its impact; that a new version of "Journey Into Imagination" is being considered and that in it, the Dreamfinder will return to his natural habitat. Here's an article from 2006 and we're now hearing a new flurry of reports. What we're ominously not hearing is that someone there has the good sense to get Chuck McCann back to breathe more life into the character he birthed.

So this is a Call To Arms for all the Disney/theme park intelligentsia out there: Let's keep up the pressure and enthusiasm to bring back the Dreamfinder…but let's add in the fact that we don't want a new, "improved," reinvented Dreamfinder. We want the one that millions of Epcot visitors loved for all those years, the one with the voice and soul of Chuck McCann.

Please post this cry (and maybe this message or a link to it) on all the Disney Theme Park blogs and forums, and let's make some noise. We Want Chuck! We Want Chuck! And also, let's make sure they keep Dave Goelz as Figment because he's another brilliantly-talented friend of mine and he reads this blog and I owe him a lunch. Thank you.

BBC Radio 4 just did a nice documentary on Mel Blanc. It runs about a half hour and at the moment, you can listen to it at this link. Don't dawdle because BBC radio links sometimes go away. Thanks to Neil Gaiman for sending me the alert on this one. Like he doesn't have better things to do with his time.

Nathan Lane's final performance in the play November (I discussed it here) will be July 13 so if you're anywhere near Broadway before then, that's the time to go see that one. Previews started on December 20 and the play opened January 17.

The producers haven't yet announced if they'll bring in a new star or close the play down. I'm guessing the latter since last week, Playbill reported attendance was at 49.5%. If you have Nathan Lane and good reviews and you're only selling half your seats, what kind of business will you do with your second choice?

You might get a kick in the box office from the Tony Awards. They're June 15 and it's not unlikely November will win a couple…but the most likely is for Nathan and he's leaving. So the show probably will, too.

Speaking of the Tony Awards, it's been announced that Whoopi Goldberg will be the host this year. Anyone have any theories regarding that pick? We can all name types of people who need some extra encouragement to watch the Tonys…but can you name one kind who'd say, "Oh, we have to watch the Tony Awards. Whoopi's hosting!"?