Monthly Archives: January 2010

Okay, see that person up there? That's Jack Benny…at about the age he was when he would have done a cameo appearance in Casablanca if he did a cameo appearance in Casablanca. But I've decided to be unconvinced that Jack Benny did a cameo appearance in Casablanca. I studied the scene where he is alleged to be lurking and, yes, there are one or two frames there where an extra who's smoking a cigarette does look somewhat like Mr. Benny…but then the guy turns and you can see it's not him. Here — take a look for yourself. You may want to view this full screen…

So I say that ain't him. Still, there is this ad, issued at the time, which challenges moviegoers to spot where in the movie Jack Benny can be seen. And some folks have also found newspaper articles of the day which claim he was in the film, not as that cigarette-smoking guy but as a waiter. Here's one of them…

Chicago Sun, February 21, 1943, p. 32, c. 2:
Jack Benny Background for Bogart

Jack Benny is in Chicago and he will do his broadcast tonight from a local studio. He is also to be seen, unheralded, in the picture "Casablanca" which has been moved to the Garrick Theater for a third week's run in the Loop.

Benny went stage-hopping at the Burbank studio recently and visited the "Casablanca" set at the time Michael Curtiz was directing a café scene featuring Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart. There were about 50 extras seated at the small tables and a number of waiters scurrying about.

There's where you'll see Benny, among the waiters. He borrowed a white coat from one of them and appears in the background all during the scene.

It is also worth noting that in all his appearances, including the time he parodied Casablanca on his own show, Jack Benny never mentioned a cameo in the movie. You'd think he would have mentioned it on some talk show or somewhere. So what's the deal here? Obviously, there are several possibilities…

1. Benny is in the movie but he's dressed as a waiter in some other place that no one has identified. This is tough to believe because it was apparently possible to spot him in a movie theater when the film was first released. Casablanca has been screened and seen an awful lot since then without (apparently) anyone saying, "Hey! There's Jack Benny!"
2. Benny was at one point in the movie but his scene was cut and the folks who made up the press kit didn't know it or maybe he was cut at the last minute after the press kit was produced. Also not likely. If that had happened, you can almost bet the contents of Jack's vault that he'd have mined that fact for laughs, saying things like, "Warner Brothers cut me out of Casablanca, one of the greatest movies ever made! I begged them to cut me out of The Horn Blows at Midnight but would they do that?"
3. Benny was never in the movie and someone at Warners decided that as a sales gimmick, they'd put out that ad and maybe people would go see the film, perhaps repeatedly, to try and spot Jack Benny. This doesn't seem all that likely to me because they'd have had to tell theater owners that it was a hoax and most of them would have feared it would engender ill will from patrons who felt duped.
4. Benny was never in the movie but someone at Warners misheard something or was misinformed so they put out press releases and arranged the little contest ad, thinking he was in there. This also doesn't sound likely to me but it sounds more likely than any of the other unlikely possibilities.

…and that's all I can come up with. In any event, I've decided that until and unless someone shows me a still or a couple of consecutive frames that look like Jack Benny in Casablanca, I'm going to assume Jack Benny was not in Casablanca. Won't you join me in this assumption?

As readers of this blog know, I think it's absurd and barbaric that same-sex couples don't have all the rights of boy/girl duos to wed. Still, I have a bad feeling about the court battle currently being waged against California's Proposition 8. A loss will set the movement back and I'm not so sure a victory won't, as well. It seems to me that my state was already well on track to legalizing Same-Sex Wedlock, as other states have, in some not-too-distant election. It's been on the ballot twice here. The first time it lost, it lost by 22 points. The second time, Prop 8 went down by a little less than 5 points. Notice which direction the momentum is going…and it isn't just in California. All but a very few outlier polls nationwide show the same trend…and some surveys in this state suggest 8 would be defeated if we voted on it today.

I have no idea if the lawyers behind the current effort (as described in this article) are right that they can get it overturned in court but wouldn't it be better if Gay Marriage was legalized by voters? Ultimately, it has to pass muster on more than just a statutory level. Those who now oppose it have to accept it as a basic fact of society, not as something arrived at by legal technicalities and slick lawyering…even if that strict lawyering is accomplishing what is right and proper.

The way this thing is going to play out is that eventually, there will be some widespread number of common gender weddings and enough time will have passed to assess their impact, which will be nil. Those who now fear such unions may notice that the world has not stop revolving and that "traditional marriage" has not crumbled as an institution. They'll find more threatening things to worry about, the way pretty much the same people have stopped worrying about flag-burning. Remember when that was the greatest danger to the American way of life?

We can get to that day through court decisions, true. But I think we'll get there sooner and with less bloodshed if it's the will of the people. Which, increasingly, it is.

The tallest structure in Las Vegas is the Stratosphere Hotel and up on top, they have several thrill rides…as if just being atop that building wasn't thrill enough. They've just announced the newest one, which will open in April.

It's called Skyjump. They strap you into a special harnessed jump-suit and you jump off the building. A cable rig takes you to the ground — 855 feet below — at a speed of 40 MPH. The press release says nothing about landing safely but I assume that's implied.

Cost for this? A hundred bucks for what I'm guessing is…well, let's do the math on this. 40 miles per hour equals 58.6666(etc.) feet per second. So this is less than a fifteen second ride…and it sounds like to something Dick Cheney would want to do to young Muslim men. I can't believe anyone would want to undergo it, let alone pay a hundred dollars for the experience. Yet I know there are people reading this who are saying to themselves, "What? I have to wait until April?" Well, enjoy yourself. I won't be joining you.

Here's a treasure of comic book history. Mike Towry, who was one of the founders of the urban sprawl we now know as the Comic-Con International, has posted audio from the very first one. They called it San Diego's Golden State Comic-Con back then and it was held in 1970 at the U.S. Grant Hotel in downtown San Diego. There are speeches there from Shel Dorf, Ray Bradbury, Jack Kirby and others.

I was there for much of this, hanging out for a time with a friend of mine named Mark Hanerfeld, who was then functioning as kind of an unpaid (pretty much) representative of DC Comics. Mark later went on staff there as an assistant editor for a time but in 1970, he was just a fan who was friends with the editors there — Joe Orlando, mainly — and they let him hang around the office and suggest or do things in a kind of informal internship. Once in a while, they'd pay him to compose a letter column or to write advertising pieces. Here's a photo I took of him at a New York Con a few years later…

If his face looks familiar, it may be because Mark was the model for a character named Abel who was the host of a comic called House of Secrets. I was also with him once when he was approached for an autograph by a lady who thought he was the great trumpet player, Al Hirt.

Anyway, Mark was the spokesperson at that con for DC Comics — the only person present at all connected with the company apart from Mr. Kirby, who had just become an editor there and whose new books had yet to be published. Everyone assumed the firm had sent Mark out to the con but, in fact, Mark had come out on his own initiative and paid his own way there because…well, Hanerfeld just did things like that. He did a great selling and cheerleading job for DC in San Diego, then went back to New York and talked up the con to everyone there. The following year, others from DC Comics began to make the trek to San Diego…and of course now, most of the comic book industry journeys out for the convention. I thought someone should note that Mark Hanerfeld was the guy who started that among East Coast people.

There's a recording there of him introducing Jack Kirby. That was supposed to be me. Jack told Shel, "Mark's going to introduce me" and Shel got his Marks confused and before I knew it, Hanerfeld was doing the honors. That was surprising but kind of a relief 'cause I had (then) a lot of jitters about speaking in front of people, even a small group for a few seconds. Jack did, too. He never got to be truly comfortable in such situations and as you'll hear, he's awkward and nervous and his mind wanders a bit.

Mark Hanerfeld passed away in January of 2000. He was a guy with a large but defective heart that kept failing him the last decade or so of his life. Our last few phone calls were very sad and it was a special joy to me to hear the voice of the old, healthy Mark…the one I'd prefer to remember. And now I'll shut up and let you go click your way over to that page — here's the link again — and listen to some of it.

More than twenty folks have sent me screen grabs of this moment in Casablanca, all presuming that the gent in the background is the one alleged to be Jack Benny. Clearly, it ain't him. Brent McKee writes…

Jack Benny was at Warner Brothers during the time that Casablanca was being shot, doing George Washington Slept Here. Production on the movie ended in June 1942 after which Benny went on an extended USO tour which included visits to Egypt, British Palestine and Iran. Production on Casablanca started on May 25, 1942 and lasted until August. So it is possible that Jack Benny could have done that brief scene at Rick's — but to me it just doesn't look like him.

Doesn't look like him to me, either. But amazingly, I find that I don't have a copy of Casablanca on DVD. I have it on Laserdisc but my Laserdisc player isn't hooked up and I don't have the time to do the major rearranging that would be necessary to get it running. So maybe Mr. Benny is elsewhere in the movie…or maybe that ad that said he was in the film was a hoax. What does anyone think?

(By the way: I'm not sure whose screen grab I posted above but I think it's the one from Andrew Leal. Thanks to everyone who sent one in.)

Did you know Jack Benny was in the movie Casablanca? I didn't know Jack Benny was in the movie Casablanca. But apparently, Jack Benny was in the movie Casablanca. He's sitting at a table just behind the piano player about seven minutes into the film and is seen for a few brief glances if you look real fast. Scott Edelman found some confirmation. (Thanks, Scott. And thanks to Anthony Tollin for telling me about this. Would someone with a good DVD of the movie like to do a screen grab I can post here?)

Here's a fun video clip but I'll save you the trouble of watching it. The first part is a montage of Republican leaders saying that the problem with Barack Obama is that he never uses the words "war" or "terrorism" or especially "war on terrorism." And then, as you might imagine, the rest of the video is excerpts from Obama speeches in which he uses those terms about eighty million times.

You kinda wish someone in the so-called Liberal Media, when a G.O.P. guy says, "Obama never uses the word 'terrorism,' would say, "We have a little video here we'd like you to watch and comment on." But that never happens. Heck, this morning on Good Morning America, Rudy Giuliani actually said, "We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We've had one under Obama," and interviewer George Stephanopoulos didn't ask him about the shoe bomber or the anthrax attacks or that incident you may vaguely remember when some buildings in New York kinda fell down.

It's a shame he said it on a Friday since Jon Stewart doesn't tape on Fridays. But it's probably good enough to wait 'til Monday's Daily Show.

A fellow in Chicago pleaded guilty Tuesday to bilking hundreds of folks by selling bogus artwork on eBay. The guy netted more than a million clams by claiming they were the works of Pablo Picasso and other famous contemporary artists. Great. Now someone oughta investigate some of the phony pieces that have been sold on that site as if they were actually by Charles Schulz, Jack Kirby, Garry Trudeau and other greats in the world of comics. And even that area probably has less fraud than the sales of "vintage" animation art.