Monthly Archives: April 2010

More bidding and cajoling is going on in the tug o' war on the future locale of the Comic-Con International. Will it remain, as God and Shel Dorf intended it, in the city of San Diego? Or will it up and move to someplace like Anaheim where it can get bigger right away? San Diego is expanding its convention facilities but it will be several years before they can provide as much space as Anaheim.

Here's the latest, which involves San Diego offering $100,000 a year for the next five years to keep the con right where it is. Much of that moola would go towards increasing the con's shuttle system since the current proposals would also increase the number of hotels that would be directly housing convention attendees.

The con is contracted to be in San Diego for 2011 and 2012. Looming is the decision as to whether it will move after that. A decision is expected in the next three weeks and I still think it'll be to stay put.

John Lahr considers the contributions to Broadway of Mr. Neil Simon. It's a good article even if he does think that Larry Gelbart (and Mike Stewart) wrote for Your Show of Shows. The IMDB still makes the same mistake with Gelbart but the way you have to submit corrections to them is not conducive to making that correction.

My pal Bob Elisberg (whose Huffington Post columns we often plug here) and I went this evening to see what was billed as Carol Burnett being interviewed by Tim Conway. A more apt description would be something about the two of them sitting around on stage talking, with Conway dominating the evening…and I may be wrong but I think he actually asked Ms. Burnett one or two questions. Not that the audience — a huge turnout that darn near filled the Saban Theater down on Wilshire — minded. Both were very funny…and even in the balcony where Bob and I were, you could tell that each of them really enjoyed laughing at the other.

One of the big secrets of being a huge comedy star on television is what I once heard an old-time joke writer, Harry Crane, describe as The Jack Benny Rule. You have to understand that when someone else gets a bigger laugh than you do on your show, it's not upstaging you. It's making your show better. Benny was famous for letting Dennis Day get the laugh, letting Don Wilson get the laugh, letting Rochester get the laugh, etc. He didn't feel threatened, just as Andy Griffith didn't regret when people said Don Knotts was the real star of The Andy Griffith Show or Mary Tyler Moore was willing to let Ed Asner or Cloris Leachman (or Ted or Gavin or Valerie…) walk off with whole scenes. No one had a bigger career than Benny, Griffith or Moore…or Burnett, who loved it when Conway and/or Harvey Korman soared. We saw some of that tonight.

The event was a function of Writers Bloc, an L.A.-based group that puts together terrific evenings with authors being interviewed, often by pretty impressive interviewers. A week or two ago, I was too swamped with work to go hear Jules Feiffer questioned by Carl Reiner. Must have been great. Here's a link to the Writers Bloc website where you can keep an eye out for upcoming programs of interest and sign up for mailings.

Anyway, Conway and Burnett screwed around on stage for a while and she was going to stay as long as she had to, they said, to sign her new book for everyone who purchased a copy. Based on the length of the line when we left, I figure she'll be done by sundown tomorrow.

Before they got to that, she and Conway took questions from the audience. I'd told Bob on the way over that the first question would be from someone asking her to do the Tarzan yell, and that all the questioners would be people talking about themselves and about how much they loved Carol (and Tim, too) and how on behalf of the entire audience, the person at the mike in the aisles just wanted to thank the two of them for all the love and all the laughs. I was right about all of this. But I was also right when I said that everyone would have a very good time.

The mainstream press is finally running obits for Allen Swift.

I'm informed that comic book writer-editor Bill DuBay passed away on April 15 from colon cancer. Dubay was best known for his long runs on the Warren magazines including Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella, though he worked for almost every publisher in existence in the eighties. I barely knew Bill and really don't know enough about him to write a proper obit here.

A memorial service will be held Saturday, May 15 for our friend Eddie Carroll, who passed away April 6. Details can be found at his website. I'm going to do my darnedest to be there.

After way too long a lull — like more than a year, hello! — the lazy bum who operates oldtvtickets.com has finally started updating it again with new old TV tickets. The other day, he posted tix (and annotations) for Barney Miller and Dotto, the latter being the 1958 quiz show (seen above) that triggered the whole investigation into whether such programs were rigged. Dotto was.

Does anyone think there could be another Quiz Show Scandal today? Most reality shows are no more honest…and hey, what about professional wrestling? Mark my words: We're going to see the day when there'll be Congressional Hearings into allegations that something on TV was honest and spontaneous. The hearings will be carefully scripted, rehearsed, edited and televised.

James Doty thinks the most offensive part of Arizona's new immigration law is and almost certainly will be ruled unconstitutional. That's the part about how cops can stop anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant — a determination, he notes, that will almost always be made on the basis of race.

The whole thing reminds me of an ugly practice we had out here for a time in Beverly Hills. I don't live in Beverly Hills but I pass through it often. So do a lot of folks who, unlike moi, are not Caucasian. There was a time when that alone was enough to get the B.H.P.D. to pull you over, detain you, question you and try to find something they could arrest or cite you for. Ostensibly, it was under a statute that gave the police broad powers to stop anyone they thought might be engaged in unlawful activities…but it was pretty well understood that the idea was to make minorities feel unwelcome, particularly in the evening when they probably weren't just going to or from a job cleaning some white person's home.

I'm a little fuzzy on when this happened but I recall a local TV station doing a hidden camera sting on the practice. They put a black guy in an old car and had him drive lawfully around Beverly Hills for several hours over a couple of nights. Over and over, he got stopped…allegedly because he'd run a red light or driven recklessly, though the tape from the hidden camera truck showed he'd done no such thing. Then they put a white man in the same car and had him drive the same streets for the same amount of time. He was utterly unstopped. The white man even ran a stop sign in full view of a police car and didn't get pulled over or ticketed.

I'm sure a little of that still goes on but it was much worse, much more blatant once upon a time. The police there finally had to give up the lie that they weren't stopping black people because they were black. There were always other reasons, they'd claimed…but they were never quite able to explain what they might be. I don't see anyone in Arizona explaining how the police are going to look at someone and, leaving race aside, deduce that there's a strong likelihood the person is an illegal alien.

But apparently, this new law is going into practice. Betcha within two weeks, there's a news story that they stopped some Hispanic who, some cop thought, looked suspiciously like an illegal alien…and it turns out to be, like, a Congressman or the Mayor or Antonio Banderas.

For years, the Daytime Emmy Award show was in New York and then it was relocated to Hollywood…and either makes sense, I guess. Some of the shows and folks nominated are in Manhattan and some are in Los Angeles — and, yes, there are a few (like Oprah in Chicago) in other burgs. But you know where none of the daytime shows are produced? Las Vegas. So guess where this year's ceremony is going to take place? Let's make everyone have to travel to get there!

Gonna be busy for the next day or two so there might not be much up here that's new for a while. I'm hesitant to announce that because when I do, I always seem to find myself back here before long, posting an obit for someone. So I'd appreciate it if no one else would die until I get a couple of scripts done. Thank you.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said on Fox News Sunday, that it would be "highly unlikely" that Republicans would filibuster President Obama's Supreme Court nominee "unless the nominee is an extraordinary individual, outside the mainstream, with really bizarre views."

Like, say, anyone to the left of Mitch McConnell.