Monthly Archives: March 2009

Noting the loss of two fine comedy writers…

Mort Lachman, who logged 28 years in the service of Mr. Robert Hope, and who also wrote for Red Skelton, All in the Family and many other venues, died Tuesday, only days before what would have been his 91st birthday. I only met Mort briefly once, early in my career, but he was a pretty potent source of inspiration in the business. Among other notable achievements, he was a writer of one-line jokes who turned into a writer of situation comedies and screenplays. Not everyone who tried to make that transitition managed it but Mort did. Here's an obit that will tell you more about the man.

And Frank Ferrante informs me of the (apparently) unpublicized loss of Robert Fisher last September. Fisher was a prolific writer of radio shows, TV programs, plays and screenplays, often in collaboration with his partner, Arthur Marx. Together, they wrote the hit Broadway play, The Impossible Years, and two shows about Arthur's family — Groucho: A Life in Revue (in which Mr. Ferrante starred) and the book for the musical, Minnie's Boys. Their other credits parallel Mort Lachman's, working on All in the Family and writing movies for Bob Hope. I met Mr. Fisher when he and Arthur were story editors, as they were for a long time, on the TV series, Alice. Nice, funny man. I don't know why his death has gone unnoted.

Legal expert Jeff Wexler says that DC Comics, Inc. no longer exists.

A brief interview with Jerry Robinson about the great exhibit up at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles.

Here's another blog you might want to visit, especially if you're interested in the TV business in general and the animation business in particular. Gordon Bressack has many awards, loads of credits and a whole lot of beefs. If you enjoyed Animaniacs and/or Pinky and the Brain, you might enjoy his blog as he was one of the folks responsible for those shows.

Like an awful lot of people, some of whom loathe each others' politics, I'm rankled by the huge bonuses that AIG has paid or is paying to its current and past execs. This is kind of an ongoing outrage with me. For at least the last decade, every time I work for a huge corporation or even read about the inner workings of one, I see the following situation: Some executive type came in, did absolutely nothing right and (often) many things that harmed the firm…then got out with salary, bonuses and maybe even a golden parachute, altogether totalling many millions of dollars.

And that isn't even the most annoying thing. The most annoying thing is that in every one of those companies, you could see this ongoing attempt to shave a few crucial bucks off the take-home paychecks of competent, hard-working lower ranked employees. It's almost like the janitors have to lose their health insurance to pay for the severance package of some incompetent vice-president. Clearly, a lot of stockholders are unaware this is happening at their companies…and a lot didn't care, as long as the price of that stock was going up.

Still, amidst all this outrage, I find my opinion drifting in the direction voiced here by Nate Silver. Mr. Silver thinks we're on the verge of warping the Rule of Law to renege on what were, at the time they were made, perfectly valid contracts. That bothers me, too. Everything about this whole mess bothers me.

This will take a bit of time to load but it's worth it. It's a demonstration of the kind of retouching that is now routinely done on glamour photos. Play around with it a little and you'll be amazed what they can do and what they do do. Thanks to Daniel Will-Harris for pointing me towards this.

A good interview with our pal, the eminently foldable Al Jaffee. Read Part One. Then read Part Two. Then read Part Three.

Fox News did a stunning bit of misleading editing the other day. It's so blatant that I can't believe someone did this intentionally, thinking it wouldn't be noticed. Take a look.