Monthly Archives: February 2010

Those of you who were moved by that article about Roger Ebert may want to catch Oprah on Tuesday. Her guests are Mr. Ebert and his wife, Chaz. Reportedly, Ebert will be answering questions using his new computer voice — the one mentioned in the article — that was constructed from recordings of his voice before he lost it. Wonder if the Academy has thought about having him present an Oscar at the upcoming ceremony.

Yesterday marked sixty years since the debut of the legendary Your Show of Shows, the legendary TV program starring Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Howard Morris and Carl Reiner, among others. It was a live show on Saturday nights which, contrary to the impression most folks have of it, was not ninety minutes of comedy sketches featuring those four folks. It was a variety show with dance numbers and music — including frequent helpings of ballet, classical and even opera — and other elements, including superb comedy by Caesar and Company. It ran on Saturday nights from February 25, 1950 until June 5, 1954 and then, like Germany after the war, they decided to break it up.

Ms. Coca went off to do her own series. Its producer, Max Liebman, went off to produce a series of spectaculars. And the comedy core of the show (sans Coca) refashioned itself as a new series called Caesar's Hour. Caesar's Hour was on for three more years and then Sid and some of the same crew did a series of intermittent specials.

Much has been made of the legendary writing staff of the various Sid Caesar shows which included, at various times, Mel Brooks, Lucille Kallen, Mel Tolkin, Aaron Ruben, Mike Stewart, Larry Gelbart, Danny Simon, Neil Simon, Selma Diamond, Sheldon Keller, Gary Belkin and many others. Carl Reiner was also a writer, though he does not appear to have ever received that credit. It's a little sore spot with some of those folks, and with TV historians, that so many confuse who worked on what.

At the moment (I'm sure it will be changed shortly) the Wikipedia page for Your Show of Shows has the following paragraph up…

Writers for the show included Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, Danny Simon, Larry Gelbart, Mel Tolkin, and Carl Reiner who, though a cast member, always sat in with the writers. A common misconception is that Woody Allen wrote for Your Show of Shows; he in fact wrote for its successor program, Caesar's Hour, which ran from 1954 to 1957. Caesar, Coca, and Liebman had worked on The Admiral Broadway Revue from January to June 1949.

Almost right. As he told people over and over and over again, Larry Gelbart never worked on Your Show of Shows. Larry was hired on Caesar's Hour and he later wrote some of Sid's subsequent specials. He said this explicitly many times and sometimes got kinda steamed about having to say it. If you want to do a Google search on the subject, you'll find a dozen places where Larry insisted he never worked on Your Show of Shows. You'll also find ten dozen articles which say Larry Gelbart was one of the writers on Your Show of Shows and even won a couple of Emmys for it.

Over on this page for the wonderful Archive of American Television, you can view lengthy, fascinating oral histories of several key folks who worked on the Caesar shows (including Mr. Caesar, himself) and I recommend spending some time there. The interviews are fascinating and if you do watch them, you'll hear several of the interviewees, including Larry Gelbart, make the point that Larry Gelbart never worked on Your Show of Shows. The interviews are right next to a history of Your Show of Shows that someone took from Wikipedia. It includes the paragraph above that says that Larry Gelbart wrote for Your Show of Shows.

I believe, by the way, that the paragraph is also wrong about Woody Allen working on Caesar's Hour. Allen has said on several occasions that he only worked for Caesar on a couple of the later specials, collaborating usually with Gelbart. In his online interview, Gelbart says the same thing.

Could somebody who knows Wikipedia better than I do please go fix this? I know how to change a few words over there but I'm lost as to how to insert footnotes and supporting evidence. Change the bit about Gelbart and footnote it with his online interview for the Archive of American Television. Change the line about Allen and footnote it with page 111 of Eric Lax's biography, Woody Allen. It may be necessary to change some of the linked pages for Gelbart, Allen, Caesar's Hour and a few others, as well. And don't do it for me. Do it for Larry. This kind of thing really pissed him off.

Lotsa folks are writing me to ask what I think about rumors that the Comic-Con International will be moving to Anaheim or maybe even Los Angeles when its current contract with San Diego expires. I think they're not exactly rumors. I think it's a fact that the convention is talking to other cities…but that's all that's happening.

And what's more, they're always talking to other cities. The convention is a wildly successful enterprise that pumps megabucks into the San Diego economy. If you were running a convention center or chamber of commerce in a city that thrives on convention business, your fondest dream would probably be to wrest the con out of San Diego's grasp and relocate it in your yard. You'd probably be approaching the Comic-Con people often with tempting offers of bigger and better facilities, more hotel space, more financial considerations, etc.

And the Comic-Con people would listen to you and let you do your little dog-'n'-pony show because, first of all, they're polite and secondly, they're in the convention business. They have to know what else is out there if only so they can go back to San Diego and say, "Hey, the Pismo Beach Chamber of Commerce just offered us free clam chowder if we move the con to a Motel 6 they have up there. What are you going to do for us?" And of course, the Comic-Con needs to consider alternatives in case the day comes when San Diego just plain doesn't work for them.

I don't think that day is coming soon. The responsible folks in San Diego would have to be pretty damn irresponsible to let a con that puts $60 million annually into the local economy get away.

As I've said here before, I don't think the Comic-Con would be as wonderful in another city. Of the three towns generally mentioned — Los Angeles, Las Vegas or Anaheim — I think L.A. would be the worst, even though I could literally get there in 15 minutes by bus. (And I'd probably take a bus because parking at the L.A. Convention Center is sometimes less convenient than driving to San Diego.) Anaheim might be the best of the three, depending on how proximity to Disneyland affected traffic, room availability and so on.

Maybe it's just wishful thinking on my part but unless San Diego is really, really stupid, I think the con's staying put. And yes, it's true that if Comic-Con ever did leave S.D., several outfits would trample over one another to get in there, lock up the San Diego Convention Center and stage a new comic book convention there, on or around the same dates. That wouldn't be the same, either.

In any case, there really isn't any news here…yet. Comic-Con is talking to other suitors and will soon decide if they're going to extend their presence in San Diego through 2015 or if they're going to go elsewhere when the current contract is up after the 2012 show. That's not really news…and the fact that there are a lot of news reports about this suddenly doesn't mean it's news. Because those reports were obviously planted and encouraged — or at least, the first recent ones were — by someone hoping to make something happen by fomenting speculation that something is about to happen.

Last week, a 40-year-old Iowa man named Christopher Handley was sentenced to six months in prison, three years of supervised release and five years of probation. His crime? No, he didn't torture anyone. They don't throw you behind bars for that in this country. They put you on Meet the Press. Mr. Handley didn't harm anyone at all except, quite arguably, himself. His crime was that he had a big collection of Japanese manga, some of which depicted underage females engaged in sexual activity.

It is worth noting that nowhere in his alleged crime were there any actual underage females. There were no claims that anyone had actually been molested, either by Handley or by those who made the manga he'd purchased. These were all drawings of imaginary underage females. It is also worth noting that Mr. Handley is an adult with no criminal record — he even served in the U.S. Navy — and it was not claimed that he'd shown his collection to children or in any way tried to replicate any actions depicted in it. He was charged merely with having the stuff in his home for his private inspection.

Initially, he faced up to fifteen years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. A threat of that magnitude is enough to make most people grab for a plea bargain…which Handley did, pleading guilty to charges of possessing "obscene visual representations of the sexual abuse of children." If he'd maintained his innocence and battled on, it would probably have kept him "imprisoned" (in the non-literal sense) for a lot more than six months. It's a deal anyone might have grabbed…but people should not be put in that situation. And our law enforcement forces and prosecutors should not be wasting time on this kind of thing…a fact they probably know. They can't have believed life in Iowa will be better with Christopher Handley behind bars for six months. At best, they knew it would be an easy "win" and some nice headlines that gave them credit for protecting children.

I couldn't bring myself to watch all of today's Health Care Summit. I did see John McCain playing Cranky Old Man with nothing positive to offer. I did see Sen. John Barrasso (a Republican doctor from Wyoming) tell us how a Canadian premier just went to Florida to get heart surgery, which seemed to be another way of saying, "Hey, there's nothing wrong with our health system. It works for rich, important people!" I saw Obama smack down some factually-unsound claims. But most of all, I saw Republicans fall back on their two big cures for whatever's wrong. One is tort reform and the other is selling insurance across state lines. Neither one would do much more than increase profits for insurance companies. Ezra Klein explains why this "opening up the market" is really just another way to further deregulate an industry that's killing people (literally) because it's so unregulated.

Robert Schooley sent me a link to this article by Michael Hiltzik, which is kind of a follow-up to the piece here the other day about rich folks paying little or no taxes. It's about how the now-divorced couple that owns the L.A. Dodgers made $108 million over a recent five-year period and paid zero state and federal taxes.

This was something that drove my late father to distraction. He worked for the Internal Revenue Service and hated his job for many, many reasons. One was just seeing how unfair was the spreading-around of the tax burden. He would come home from work some days, shaking his head over the inequity…how some poor guy living off minimum wage and struggling to feed his family would be hit with a huge tax bill while some zillionaire got away without paying a nickel. Too often, it was like famed hotel magnate Leona Helmsley said: "We [the rich] don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes."

I understand not wanting to pay taxes. Despite the way Conservatives sometimes caricature Liberals, no one likes the idea of taxes, and if I had enough loot to own the Dodgers, I'd tell my accountants to use every legal means to lower my tax bills. What I don't get is why low-income folks who especially resent their tax burden cheer on the rich folks' avoidance and don't demand the laws be adjusted to spread the burden more fairly. I always think of that line in the play 1776 where John Dickinson explains to John Hancock that "most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor." Since the day in which that show was set, it's kind of evolved into "most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming super-rich than face the reality of being poor."

It's more-or-less conventional wisdom that when an incumbent in political office is polling below 50% for some upcoming election, that incumbent is toast. Nate Silver crunches numbers and demonstrates that's not true; that plenty of incumbents get elected again even though at some point, they were below the 50% mark. A good thing to keep in mind.

Matt Taibbi has become the go-to guy if you want to hear what treacherous bastards the execs at Goldman Sachs were and are, and how their greedy machinations have been responsible for much of this country's current financial tar pit. This is not to say he's totally wrong or totally right, though I suspect he's closer to the latter. This latest article of his will make you laugh and get angry, often both via the same sentence.

Fred Kaplan reconsiders the usefulness of NATO, particularly in Afghanistan. I never quite understood why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was involved in Afghanistan at all when, last I looked, Afghanistan was not in or around the North Atlantic.

Back in the Reagan administration, Bruce Bartlett was one of the architects of the theory that if we cut taxes (especially for rich people), that would force a shrinkage in government spending. He is now writing pieces like this one saying how that idea has never worked.

I was especially impressed with this line which I came across in Bartlett's comment section. Couldn't have put it better myself…

Republicans depend on this message (or think they do) because it is essential to the coalition Reagan built, which enabled them to pass off a fundamentally corporate-friendly worldview as a populist appeal to the average American (who hates taxes).

Someday, the average American will wake up to the revelation that their taxes would be a lot lower if the wealthiest Americans paid some. One of the things I find amazing in our national debate about taxes is that discussions of raising or cutting them are usually only about raising or cutting them for rich people. Even folks who are maniacal about slashing taxes give Obama very little credit for lowering them on the lower and middle class. It's like a tax cut isn't a tax cut unless the folks who own Walmart get it. And you can still be hailed as a great cutter-of-taxes, as per George W. Bush, if you raise them on those who work at Walmart and/or drive up the debt, which of course will lead to higher taxes on someone at some point.