Monthly Archives: May 2010

Our pal James H. Burns sent me this and it was too good not to share…

For me, Frank Frazetta will always be the guy who taught me how to shoot a Magnum.

I went up to Frazetta's Pennsylvania home (about seventy acres, in the Poconos). in the summer of 1983, to do an article on his animated feature film, Fire and Ice, directed by Ralph Bakshi. We hit it off and spent a couple of days talking about his career, and art, and movies, and women, and baseball…

Frank was surprised that even though we had it in common that we had both played baseball, and spent a lot of time in the city, I had never fired a gun.

We went over to the lake just outside his house, on his property, and began with a .38. Then, we moved onto the Magnum, and I immediately learned the fiction in all those action film gun-fights: You can't fire a .44, or a .357, without your ears ringing — for about a minute, in which you're terrified that your hearing will never return.

(There was an intriguing symmetry: I was learning how to fire a Magnum at the same home visited by Clint Eastwood (whom Frazetta resembled, at one point in his youth, and for whom he had painted the advertising poster for The Gauntlet.)

Perhaps the most amazing element of a sojourn to the Frazetta abode were the hundreds of paintings and sketches that it seemed to me had never before been seen: particularly a treasure trove of humorous, and other mainstream work. (I would bet that even with the innovation of that marvelous Frazetta museum, and all the art books, there still remains a wonderful world of visions that the public is not yet familiar with.)

Frazetta and I wound up hanging out for many hours beyond our interview, shooting the breeze, on a late July evening, as at least a couple of cats darted into the porchlight to say hello. It struck me that Frazetta just missed being able to talk about the fantasy business, and comics, and all the rest, the way he no doubt had, in years past, with his EC Comics, and other artist friends. (A multitude of folks like me had made the trek to meet with Frazetta, through the years.)

I mentioned to Frank that he might enjoy popping into Manhattan (about ninety minutes to two hours away), once in a while, just to reacquaint himself with some of the comics and other shops, and possibly meeting more people he might enjoy talking with. Frazetta quickly pointed out that he could grab the express bus to New York City, whenever he wished, right at the roadway at the edge of his property…

Various accounts will mention that Frank wondered what would have happened had he pursued a baseball career (as you did), or had he been a little more, as Frazetta put it, tenacious with his artwork, at least earlier in his life. But it's well known that Frank enjoyed painting what he wanted to paint, when he wanted to paint it.

And I think there's another key.

Whatever the recent controversies have been, Frazetta — at least for a long while — living amid those sylvan woods, was exactly where he wanted to be, creating and playing, surrounded by his wife and family.

That's a nice thing about Frank…and it extended to his major paintings. They're all him. Even the earlier paperback and magazine covers where he had to follow editor's dictates…once he got the originals back, he'd usually retouch to get them the way he wanted them. Otherwise, up until the end when his family had all that infighting — and excepting medical problems, of course — he seems to have lived his later life pretty much the way he wanted.

The one time I know of that Frazetta didn't get to do a painting his way in his later years was the cover he did for MAD in 1995. By then, Frank was rarely accepting assignments and when he did, he generally got about a hundred times what MAD paid for a cover…but the magazine's editor then was his old pal Nick Meglin, and because (I guess) he felt he owed Nick for past help and support, he agreed to the job. Everything was going fine until a senior exec at the company — someone above Nick and in spite of Nick's objections — demanded that Frazetta put a yellowish background on it.

Frank didn't like the idea…and I was actually in Nick's office when they discussed it on the phone and I heard Frazetta's voice through the handset yelling, "Tell him to look at every painting I've ever done and find me one where I had a yellow background!" But he gave in and did it, mostly to just get the thing over with and out of his life. It was one of the few times in his later life when Frazetta didn't have total control and I'm sure it would have been a better cover if he had. Maybe he should have put that .357 Magnum to use.

You've seen me write here about my friend, Frank Ferrante, the great impersonator of Groucho Marx. You've also seen me recently lament the passing of Frank's (and my) mutual friend, Eddie Carroll, the great impersonator of Jack Benny. There's a memorial service tomorrow for Eddie and Frank can't be there because he's filling in for Eddie. Eddie was supposed to perform in Longview, Washington on Saturday but when he took ill, he cancelled that appearance and Frank was quickly booked in his place.

Here's a nice story about a lady named Dorothy Ohman who arranged to go see Eddie because she used to work for Jack Benny. And she's fine with the substitution because she also used to work for the Marx Brothers.

Sam Stein explains the political coalitions and manuevers that got Health Care Reform passed in this country. It shouldn't have taken all that. They should have just passed it because it was the right thing to do.

You may have noticed some software weirdness if you tried to access this site in the last hour or so. Methinks it is all repaired now. Sorry for any inconvenience and thanks to the 73 million people who wrote to tell me about it.

The Little Orphan Annie newspaper strip ends on June 13. It started August 5, 1924, the creation of cartoonist Harold Gray, and I have to say that its appeal has long eluded me. I know its popularity had something to do with the taste then for Horatio Alger melodrama and that it really became a smash during the Great Depression…but I never understood why people of that era were so infatuated with the thing.

It's nice to think that an affluent industrialist might take in a poor, parentless waif…but Daddy Warbucks always seemed like the worst kind of rich guy to me, filled as he was with patronizing speeches about how if you're not wealthy, it could only be because you haven't worked hard enough. It also never struck me that Annie had a particulary happy life. She always managed to look sad and homeless, even though her dialogue was peppered with clichés of optimism and hope. And of course, every few weeks something awful would happen to her and she'd be a sad case until someone came to her rescue.

I have friends, some of them scholars of comic strips, who love Orphan Annie and when I tell them I always found it a talky, reactionary bore, they tell me, "Oh, no! Read these weeks of it and you'll see how wonderful it can be!" So I read those weeks of it and I always decide it's even more of a talky, reactionary bore than I'd thought before.

Perhaps my problem was that I first read the strip in the sixties when Gray really sounded like he was cribbing dialogue from pamphlets for the John Birch Society and there was very little in the strip besides that. It was just Daddy Warbucks standing around, lecturing people about some strange, friends-of-Richard-Nixon interpretation of the American work ethic. And then every so often, Gray would think of something awful to do to Annie and she'd be a sad case until someone came to her rescue.

Gray died in '68 and that's when Little Annie truly became an Orphan, handed off thereafter from one creative guardian to another. While I'm sure others will argue, I thought it was one of those rare cases when a strip got better when it was no longer done by its creator, particularly when Leonard Starr was in command from 1979 to 2000. Some of the others were good, too…though as Annie lost papers, they weren't playing to much of an audience. I read a few of those sequences and liked them more than anything I ever read by Harold Gray.  I also preferred the Broadway musical and the movie made from it…though I didn't like either that much.

At times after Mr. Starr quit, the syndicate tried to find someone who'd write and draw it for rates commensurate with its income as a newspaper strip, which meant Depression Era wages. At one point, they got so desperate that they even offered the gig to a writer-artist team, of which I was the writer. I told the artist, "Well, if you want to do it, I'll do it," and then hoped he'd say no as I pondered what the heck I could bring to a feature that to my mind had outlived its relevance some time around when the New Deal kicked in.

I sat there with my eyeballs probably as vacant as Annie's, pondering for almost a half-hour before the artist called and said (to my relief), "I just found out what the job pays. Forget about it." I assume the others who then took it on got more than they'd offered us. They must have.

While writing the above, I was interrupted by a call from a nice lady from CBS Radio who interviewed me about Annie's demise. I pretty much said what I just wrote above but she threw me when she asked what I thought would take Annie's place in the world. I should have said, "I don't think Annie has a place in the world and hasn't for a long time."

Instead, I muttered something about how, well, I guess someone could come along and whip up a strip to cheerlead for victims of the current economic downturn. If they could just get everyone who's currently out of work to follow the strip, it could make its creator as rich as ol' Dad Warbucks.

Too much to do in the next few days so posting and e-mail response will be, like my best necktie, on the spotty side. Try to find something else to read on the Internet for a while…and yes, I know it won't be easy.

Carolyn and I are just back from opening night of the Reprise! production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying up at the Freud Playhouse at UCLA. This one deserves a long, gushy rave that I don't have time to write tonight. If you're in the area and at all a fan of this musical, you'll really enjoy what they do with it. It's there through May 23 and when I get past the current work crunch, I'll write a long piece about why you should go see it. But don't wait for that. Get tickets as soon as you can.

And just to remind you: This Saturday and next, the 2 PM matinees will be preceded by a one-hour lecture at Noon on the history of the show. Both lectures will be delivered by me and at this Saturday's, I'll be joined on the stage by the wonderful Claudette Sutherland, who was a member of the original Broadway cast of How to Succeed. I'll be interviewing her, prying all sorts of secrets and history out of her memory. The lecture is free and you don't have to stay for the performance…but you should.

Sorry I'm so swamped. I'm going to post a video link, then put up a soup can and get back to work.

Number two in a series…

I'm just now catching up on a silly controversy that's apparently been festering for a few days and which looks like it's good for two or three more. Our pal Neil Gaiman gave a speech recently at a library. It got out how much he was paid. A couple of folks got indignant over the amount he charged, objecting as if Neil had pulled out a .357 Magnum, pointed it at some elderly librarian lady and forced her to fork over the loot. Neil should not have had to write this piece explaining his reasons (and citing the vast amounts of pro bono speaking he does) but he did, and that oughta end it for anyone with a genuine desire to understand how this kind of thing works. In case it doesn't…

In the 41 years I've been a freelance writer, I've witnessed loads of misunderstanding — some of it quite innocent and understandable — about the lifestyle. Folks who are consistently paid X dollars per hour for what they do sometimes don't get that we aren't; that we make a lot of money for some things, not very much for others, nothing at all for (often) most of what we do…and that maybe, if we're lucky, it averages out to X per hour. If you just hear what one thing paid, you're seeing a tiny piece of the jigsaw.

Determining what some job, be it writing or speaking or creating anything, is "worth" is difficult. I'm not saying it can't be done. It is done — all the time — but it's subjective and even in full possession of more information than any spectator, we have trouble with it. Neil probably can't even fairly gauge what his appearance was "worth" to the library that sought him out, heard his price and wrote a check. You can tally how many people showed at the door. Harder to assess is the value to the institution's rep, to fulfilling a certain amount of its Mission Statement, to having the talk broadcast on radio, etc. Is the library complaining? I don't know that they are. If they are, then maybe someone shouldn't have said yes to Neil's apparently standard honorarium. I believe him when he says he prices his talks so he won't wind up doing too many of them…and I know for a fact that he often lectures for free and/or donates fees to good causes.

I think I've told this story elsewhere on this blog but one time, my pal Sergio was selling a drawing of his for…I don't recall. Let's say $200. A possibly-interested customer asked him how long the drawing had taken him and Sergio said, "Oh, about a half-hour." The browser gasped and said, "You expect me to pay you $200 for a half-hour of work?" To which Sergio replied, "No, you're paying me for the thirty years it took me to learn how to do that in half an hour." The worth cannot be figured the same way you figure out how to pay the kid who mows your lawn. If you hire Neil Gaiman to come lecture in your venue, you're not paying him for the exact number of hours it takes him to come and talk. You're buying the heat, the excitement, the joy, the prestige — whatever the reason was you wanted him — of having Neil Gaiman come and talk. And yes, he could charge less…but if he did, he couldn't do all those lectures for charity, couldn't donate speaker fees to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, and he'd be booked solid for speaking engagements and wouldn't have time to (a) write the next Neil Gaiman book or even (b) come to your building to discourse.

On balance, weighing this against that, the pricing system usually all makes fiduciary sense for the freelancer and for those who pay him or her. I'm sure it does for Neil. He doesn't deserve any grief whatsoever for setting his price for those willing to pay it. He shouldn't even have to take the time to explain that.

With a modicum of web-surfing, you can find loads of tributes to Frank Frazetta. I especially enjoyed what my longtime buddy William Stout wrote.

This site showcases a number of Frazetta's movie posters and raises a question I have. It's about his poster, which is over on that page, for The Night They Raided Minsky's. As I recall, the final version of that one was a mess of pasteovers and redos because the studio had demanded that this be changed, that be changed, etc. I saw the original painting many years ago and pieces were falling off it, though I would imagine that wherever it is today, it's been professionally restored. I also recall that some film magazine in the late sixties printed a not-great image of the "before" version which was sexier and had all the stars in different places. The image in the final version of Jason Robards was Bert Lahr then, for example, and Robards was somewhere else in the painting. Does there exist somewhere a good copy of what Frazetta originally painted?

Leonard Maltin remembers a wondrous encounter with the lovely Lena Horne.

Roger Ebert, who has an obvious interest in the topic, discusses facial reconstruction surgery and tells us what he will and won't do.