Monthly Archives: June 2009

Comic book and animation artist Dave Simons has died at the age of 54 following a long battle with cancer.

David Lloyd Simons was a native New Yorker with a childhood passion for comic books. Art teachers encouraged and advised him, and while he was serving in the Coast Guard in the seventies, he began attending classes conducted by one of Marvel's star artists, John Buscema. Dave would later say he owed his career to those workshops, citing not only Buscema's teaching but also the friendships he forged there with other young artists, including Armando Gil and Ken Landgraf. At a 1979 comic convention, he showed his work to Rick Marschall, who was then an editor for Marvel, and this led to Dave getting work at the company. His first assignment was inking a Falcon story that I wrote and which was pencilled by John's brother, Sal Buscema.

Dave followed it with work on many Marvel titles including Howard the Duck, Tomb of Dracula, Ghost Rider, Red Sonja, Conan the Barbarian and many more, segueing from inking to also at times, pencilling. He also worked for DC and Disney, but by the early nineties, had moved more into animation work. Among the shows that featured his design and storyboard work were G.I. Joe Extreme, Captain Planet, Masters of the Universe, Exo-Squad and Courage the Cowardly Dog.

He was a very talented, enthusiastic artist. His work was well-liked and Dave was well-liked. A lot of folks are saddened to hear we've lost him.

Last week when I was in Las Vegas, I stayed at the Excalibur Hotel for the first but probably not the last time. Prior to this, I guess I was put off by the exterior decor, which is garish and which tends to make the whole place look like a colossal joke some very drunk architects played on their employers. Around 1993, during a period when a lot of ancient Vegas casinos were being imploded, one of the town's newspapers polled its readers on which hotel they'd like to see levelled. They meant for folks to vote for the old, dilapidated ones from the fifties and early sixties. Instead, the winner was the Excalibur, which was built in 1990.

But I picked it for a number of reasons. One was that it was cheap — $31 a night…which shows you how bad business is in that city. Usually, when you get a room that cheap, it either means it's in a flophouse or it's on fire or you have to share it with a live moose or something. As I was travelling alone, I didn't need any particular luxury.

Secondly, the Excalibur's basic rooms do not have bathtubs…just showers. This I like, having long endured the clumsiness I feel in those combos where you have to stand in a tub to take a shower. At check-in, the desk clerk asked me if I'd like a complimentary upgrade to a better quality room. I asked, "Does it have a combination bathtub and shower?" She said yes and I said, "I'd rather stick with the lower quality room." It was fine.

It was also (third reason:) perfectly situated. I had an invite to go see David Copperfield over at the MGM Grand, which is across the street from the Excalibur. And I was attending a convention at the Mandalay Bay, which is two hotels down from the Excalibur and connected by a walkway and a tram. Couldn't be easier.

Striding through the Excalibur, I kept seeing these signs offering Strip Poker…a game I have played in its basic form but once in my life. It was at a party when I was nineteen and the whole point of it was that there was one girl there who was dying to take her clothes off in front of everyone and somehow thought she needed a faux reason. So we played until Marla lost, which she accomplished by folding once with four-of-a-kind and once with a full house.

But that's not the kind of Strip Poker they're dealing at the Excalibur, which is probably a good thing. I've never played poker in Vegas but I've seen the kind of people who do. You wouldn't want most of them to take off their visors, let alone actual items of apparel. In the Excalibur version, they bring in a professional stripper and every time a player busts out, she takes off something.

Here are the rules. As you can see, they call for the dancer to remain "minimally though appropriately covered," which would apply to about half the women who shop at Trader Joe's in Los Angeles. And let me quote two other rules I find amusing…

• Although the dancer may converse with the customers, the dancer will not engage in any solicitous activities at any time.
• The dancer will dance and carry herself in an appropriate manner. Dances, physical movements and any other actions of an overtly sexual nature are forbidden.

It all strikes me as a perfect example of the inherent, quaint contradiction of Las Vegas. They want to offer you something naughty but it has to be "safe naughty" that can offend no one, cause no possible legal problem. I mean, you just know how this must have gone down. Someone came in one day and said, "Hey, you know the game that will get people excited? Strip poker!" And then someone else yelled, "Great! We'll combine gambling with sex. The only problem is that, well, you know…some of our poker players are pretty ugly." "No problem," said the first guy. "We'll bring in someone — a dancer or someone you'd like to see strip." And the boss proclaimed, "Okay, but we better protect ourselves. Get together with the lawyers and have them work out something so no one can get mad or sue."

And there you have it: Someone's actually figured out a way to strip most of the fun from Strip Poker.

I'll bet it won't last. And I'll also bet it won't make any money for them, either, which is not to say it couldn't. What they'd have to do is not get so corporate uptight with it…and also find a lady who looks exactly like Marla did in 1971. If they could, they just might have something.

As expected, the membership of the Screen Actors Guild has voted to ratify and accept the new contract that many campaigned against. The vote was 78%, which is a little higher than I was expecting.

If you scan the websites that have been tracking or debating the vote, you'll find a wide range of interpretations as to what this vote means. The 37,000 or so members who cast ballots probably had at least 3,700 reasons among them but I'll throw this one out as a likely one: Even actors who thought the contract was inadequate didn't feel their guild had enough solidarity or leadership to do anything about it. In order to get people to reject Plan A, you have to have a Plan B…and SAG didn't really have one. Or anyone out front who could put one into place.

So now all eyes turn to June of 2011 when the contracts of the Writers Guild, the Directors Guild, SAG and AFTRA all expire within a few weeks of each other, thereby melding into one big negotiation. Can four labor organizations that often go in different directions and sometimes sell one another out…can they instead link arms for their common good? Probably not…but I can't wait to see how they/we blow it.

My pal Vince Waldon just sent me this link with the comment, "And you thought they waited a long time to honor Jerry Herman…"

If you're interested on what's been on Broadway the last year, the Tony Awards website has a great page of clips from darn near every show that's opened in that time. I dunno how long it'll be up but it's there at the moment.

The Gallup Poll says that 69% of Americans now favor getting rid of that silly "Don't ask, don't tell" nonsense and allowing gays to serve openly in the military. This includes 58% of folks who identify themselves as Conservatives or Republicans, and 60% of those who say they regularly attend church.

So, uh, what's the hold up here? The only thing I can imagine is that President Obama has some reason to believe this would not sit well with the military themselves, either the brass or the rank-and-file, and that he's looking for a way to deal with that problem. Assuming the poll is not an outlier — and it doesn't appear to be — is there any other possible explanation?

The folks at Salon have compiled a list of some of the nuttier lies about Barack Obama. I don't even think the folks spreading most of these stories believe 'em…but they do believe there's an audience for such nonsense.

Audio problems aside, I thought the Tony Awards were terrific…this, despite the fact that I saw none of the nominated shows and didn't have any rooting interest whatsoever in any of the nominees. As mentioned, I felt the opening was quite spectacular. The special material that Neil Patrick Harris (a fine host) performed under the end credits was also quite wonderful…so they had me coming and going.

To a certain extent, these telecasts have an infomercial component: Will the brief presentations from the musicals sell tickets? I suspect Hair and Billy Elliott moved some seats in their mezzanines…and so did Jersey Boys (which wasn't even one of this year's nominees) and to a lesser extent, the one from Next to Normal. The excerpt from Shrek didn't arouse any yearning within me to rush the box office, nor did the numbers from Pal Joey, Rock of Ages or West Side Story. The segment from Guys and Dolls made me not want to buy a ticket, especially when I mentally compare it to the same song as performed on the Tony Awards the last time that show was revived.

It was nice to see Jerry Herman receive a Lifetime Achievement Award but I always wonder about the timing of these things. Earlier this year at the Oscars, Jerry Lewis got the Humanitarian Award for raising two billion dollars for charity and making all those popular movies. Why didn't they give it to him twenty years ago when he'd raised one billion dollars and made all those same movies? Why was he suddenly deserving of it this year? Jerry Herman did Milk and Honey in 1961, Hello, Dolly! in 1964, Mame in 1966, Dear World in 1969, The Grand Tour in 1979, La Cage aux Folles in 1983 and darn near nothing since then. What happened that made someone decide he finally warranted a Lifetime Achievement Award?

Oh, well. Good show. I'm glad someone made the decision a few years ago to stop confining it to two hours…and rigidly timing it so it couldn't slip over even a few minutes into the local news. This year, it ran about five minutes over and the world, amazingly, did not end. Remember how they used to act like it would?

Just started watching the Tony Awards on my TiVo. What an opening number. There's no reason to watch the rest of the show.

Given the preceding item posted here, I was tempted to start this one, "Speaking of disasters occurring on soundstages at Universal Studios…" But truth has to trump funny segues and the truth is that I don't think Conan O'Brien's first week hosting The Tonight Show was a disaster…but I also don't think it was all that wonderful. I guess I was disappointed that he and his crew felt that they could (or should) do pretty much the same show they've been doing for years, except an hour earlier and on the opposite coast.

I've always liked Conan O'Brien, even back in his earliest days when much of the industry was proclaiming him a flop as Letterman's successor and predicting his hasty return to Simpsons writing. I thought he was better than that, and it was nice to see him stick with it and refine his act, sanding off the rough edges until he began to project the notion that he might belong in the job. He and his crew had the wise sense not to panic and begin changing everything around. They didn't start fiddling with the set and format, didn't bring in new sidekicks or anything of the sort. They just kept doing what was essentially the same show, only doing it better and better, until it was good enough for sufficent viewership to accept.

The last few years though, I've felt like he's been doing the same show a little too long. I can't think of a new segment or running gag or new character introduced in quite a while. I thought to a large degree, he'd settled into generating response from the live audience by trotting out catch phrases and acting goofy and playing to them instead of the cameras. If you and I were in the studio, we'd probably laugh out of recognition but we wouldn't laugh, watching the same antics at home. Mr. Carson endured as long as he did because he knew that the job description involved entertaining the people not in your studio audience. I'm not sure any pretenders to his throne appreciate the distinction, the possible exception being David Letterman. (I get the feeling Dave does understand the difference and would simply rather entertain the folks in his theater.)

So I guess I was let down that after all those months of planning, the only real change in Conan's act is that he's doing it from a larger, fancier building. I don't see that that adds a thing to the proceedings and it may even diminish them. Like Norma Desmond famously taught us, when the sets get bigger, the actors get smaller.

I think the set's too big and I think Andy Richter's in the wrong section of it. He's a funny guy, not Ed McMahon, and the best thing I saw all week on the show involved the only non-awkward exchange he and Conan had…Andy sitting next to the host doing "In the Year 2000." Perhaps symbolic of how the show has changed (and not changed), they made it fancier and more expensive and made the cosmetic change to the Year 3000…but it's still the same bit they've been doing since the Year 2000 was actually in the future. And the fun in it is that the two of them are working together. I like Conan better when he's not out there all alone.

We're not budging off our prediction that his ratings will be fine, at least for a while…or that there'll be a week or two when it won't look that way. We're also still hoping that what we saw this past week was Mr. O'Brien and his producers leading with what they knew worked and that they'll soon be introducing new elements into the mix. But nothing I've seen so far made me think, "I've got to make sure I don't miss an episode of this." It's just another talk show that I'll TiVo every night and then watch until it goes déjà vu on me…or not watch at all if the guests don't seem all that exciting. It took Leno a couple years to get me to that point but with Conan, it happened around half past Wednesday night's program.