Monthly Archives: March 2011

Among my favorite things on the web are Kliph Nesteroff's interviews of veteran comedians and comedy writers. He just posted Part One of an interview with Steve Rossi and before that, he had a great chat with writer Bill Persky. Matter of fact, while you're over there, check out any of his conversations with funny people.

Quite a few people have written to ask me to compile my own "Top 100 Comedy Movies" list but I'm not going to do that. I was faulting the voters in that other list for not knowing anything produced before 1974 or thereabouts…but I'd be just as deficient in that I'm not familiar with a lot of the comedy films of the last ten or fifteen years. I don't know if Will Ferrell has made any movies that are deserving of being on such a list. I just know that there's something wrong with a list that purports to name the best of all time and doesn't include Woody Allen, the Marx Brothers, Stan and Ollie, Keaton, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, The Producers, anything by Blake Edwards or Billy Wilder, etc.

One of my favorite episodes of the original Twilight Zone was "Escape Clause," written by Rod Serling. You may remember it. David Wayne played a hypochondriac who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for eternal life. Nothing can harm him. Nothing can kill him. And what he does with this newfound invulnerability is to go around, putting himself into life-threatening situations like hurling himself in front of a speeding train and drinking poison, ratcheting up the jeopardy in search of a thrill that does not come. Eventually, of course, he takes it too far and achieves the self-destruction that was hard-wired into his soul.

So, uh, where is Evanier going with this? Believe it or not, this is a post that's sort of about Charlie Sheen…only it isn't. People keep e-mailing me to ask what I think of his recent exploits, including his assertion that he keeps "winning" even though he was fired last week from a $2 million-per-episode job on a hit series and that an awful lot of his industry and audience thinks he's a lunatic.

I don't know Charlie Sheen and I'm real skeptical of anyone's psychoanalysis of someone they've never met…so like I said, this is not about him. It's more like my answer to the question, "Why do some rich and famous folks do things like this? I think Rod Serling gave me a lot of the answer.

If you achieve success in this world, you can react to it in two ways. One is to accept and enjoy it. The other is to resent that it doesn't solve every single problem in your life and that it can actually create new ones. What was key to Mr. Serling's teleplay was that David Wayne's character was a neurotic before he traded off his soul…and gaining eternal life didn't take away that neurosis. It just made it worse because he couldn't even worry about catching a cold any longer. He was an unhappy man and he just needed something to be unhappy about.

People who make millions per week like Charlie Sheen did sometimes embrace the magic spell that has come over them but sometimes, they just plain don't know how to do that. They've lived on the window ledge so long that they need a little struggle in their lives…need to understand how far the super powers extend and to find out if there's a Kryptonite out there for them. David Wayne had to test his immortality. Some rich 'n' famous folks need to test their success and play with it, seeing just how far they can push it before someone hauls off and slaps them across the puss. That's the only way they think they'll understand it. There's also usually a lot of guilt involved. They just get away with so many things they know in their hearts they shouldn't get away with.

One time in Vegas back in my Blackjacking days, I shared a table with a player who started with $500 and within two hours had it up to around $10,000. I was winning too but not like that. I think I started with $200 and when I hit $500, I quit…but I stayed around long enough to see the guy lose the entire ten grand and believe me, it wasn't easy. He had to make riskier and riskier bets to do that.

Later, I was talking with a wizened casino veteran about gamblers like that. We were standing in the casino at Bally's — then, maybe the largest and most lavish in town — and my friend gestured to the room in general and said, "They build places like this off guys like that." Then he added, "Some people are just like that. They don't play to win. They play to see how high they can fly before they crash and burn."

Here's a quick look at the history of Popeye. A lot of folks don't know that it was once the cleverest comic strip in the newspaper and that it had very little to do with spinach and beating up guys named Bluto or Brutus. Not that there's anything wrong with the Max Fleischer cartoons but…well, they're wonderful in their own way. Elzie Segar's original comic strip was wonderful in a different way.

I never get upset over "Top 10" or "Top 100" or "Top Any Number" lists and you shouldn't be bothered by a survey conducted by a website called College Humor to determine the 100 Best Comedies of All Time. I am kinda curious if the respondents just haven't seen any movie made before 1974 (I think the oldest one on there is Blazing Saddles) or if they really think five Adam Sandler movies are better than anything the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Billy Wilder, Charlie Chaplin, Jack Lemmon, W.C. Fields, Peter Sellers, Buster Keaton or Woody Allen ever did. Those folks are unrepresented but Will Ferrell has four on the list, two of them in the top ten.

Does anyone really think Spaceballs is one of the greatest comedies of all time and The Producers isn't in the top hundred? I'll bet there wasn't even a single person who worked on Spaceballs who thinks that. Hey, does anyone even think that National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is better than National Lampoon's Vacation?

I do like the part that says Anchorman is Will Ferrell's Citizen Kane. Yeah, I can see the parallels. And it is interesting to me that even Chevy Chase, Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin are somewhat passé with these voters. Each got but one or two films on the list, far from the top.

Oddly, the top pick is Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is at least a few decades back and a reasonable choice…though I personally think The Life of Brian (which they have at #45) is a much better movie.

Life of Brian might have been my pick for Numero Uno…or maybe The Producers, A Night at the Opera, The General or one of around ten other movies that are absent from this list. Phil Conley sent me this link and said, "At least half of the movies on this list are ones I'd have to be paid to watch." Admittedly, I haven't seen all of them either but apparently none of the voters have seen anything made prior to Richard Nixon's resignation. And come to think of it, if they'd released that as a feature, it would have been my first choice.

I really like this photo that someone took with my camera at a New York Con. The guy on the left is Charlie Kochman of Harry N. Abrams Books. He's the editor/exec responsible for my book on Jack Kirby and for that great collection Abrams put out of Al Jaffee's Tall Tales cartoons. The fellow on the right is, it would seem, me.

The man between us is Al Jaffee, who is 90 years old today and still doing what he does best…creating silly pictures for MAD magazine. I always liked Al's work and in all my days of reading MAD and researching MAD and writing about MAD and talking about MAD with most of the key people who've created its contents, I've never met anyone who didn't like Al Jaffee's work. I haven't even met anyone who didn't like Al Jaffee the human being, which is amazing. I mean, you figure: The guy's that talented and beloved, there have got to be at least a few people jealous of him. If there are, I sure haven't found them. He's not only a great talent but a great gentleman as well. Those two things don't always go together but with Al, one seems like an extension of the other.

Anyway, I like this photo because it shows me next to the wonderful Mr. Jaffee and maybe, just like guilt by assocation, someone will think that some of what's great about him is rubbing off on me. I wish. But what I really like about this photo is that you can fold the right third of it over the middle third and make Al Jaffee completely disappear. If you're viewing this on an iPad, try folding it over and see if I'm not right.

Happy 90, Al. And congratulations on becoming middle-aged.

Wednesday evening, Turner Classic Movies is running The Projectionist. If you've never seen this movie, see this movie. If you have seen this movie, you're going to want to see it again. It's on at 11:30 PM in most areas but check your listing to make sure before you set a DVR or VCR or even tune in to watch it live.

The Projectionist was made for about a dollar-eighty in 1971 and it stars Chuck McCann, Rodney Dangerfield and Ina Balin. Chuck plays a film projectionist who lives way too much of his life in fantasy, imagining himself as the heroes of the movies he runs. It makes for a funny but touching story with Chuck giving one of the greatest performances you'll ever see. And in case you care, it was Rodney Dangerfield's motion picture debut.

I don't want to write much more than that because I don't want to ruin it for anyone who hasn't seen it yet. Just watch this one. It's been a cult favorite for years and if you tune in, you'll probably find yourself joining the cult.

Some on Las Vegas message boards are reacting with a mixture of shock and dismay at the news that the Sahara Hotel, which first opened in 1952, will close May 16. Its owners haven't decided what to do with the place but they say "…at this point, the continued operation of the aging Sahara was no longer economically viable."

I don't know why this comes as a surprise to anyone. The number of people who want to go to Las Vegas and gamble is not an infinite resource. With hotel after hotel opening, there have to be ones that fail because supply exceeds demand. The Sahara has long been a likely candidate to lose out in that competition.

First of all, it's old. It's not old and beautiful. It's not even old and quaint. It's just old. It's located way down at the end of The Strip, convenient to almost nothing. It has no restaurants that have distinguished themselves and its buffet has received consistently bad reviews for decades. No big stars have played its showroom in a long time. Its gaming is not known for better-than-other-hotels odds. It is cheap but so are a lot of hotels that don't have its negatives. Its brand name has a lot of history but so do a lot of hotels that don't have its negatives. Besides, no one pauses as they make their lodging selections to say, "I've just got to stay someplace where Sinatra hung out fifty years ago." About the only thing the Sahara has that some others do not is a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail…the one nobody rides.

In brief, I can't think of a single reason why anyone would want to go there except maybe that it's a part of Vegas history…but if that's what you crave, other parts (like the Flamingo, Caesars and even the Tropicana) are better bets. Sinatra gamboled and gambled at them, too.

It's true we are losing Old Vegas. The Desert Inn, where my parents were married sixty years ago this month, is gone, displaced by the Wynn. The Sands is gone and so are the Frontier and the Stardust and the original Aladdin and several others…but it was the same with all of them. They'd evolved into hotels that couldn't compete; that couldn't offer you anything you couldn't get down the block cheaper and/or better. But actually what we're losing in most cases are the names of these places. Everything else was gone long ago. For example, when the Desert Inn was demolished, everything from the original structure had long since been replaced, some of it many times over. It was like the story of the guy who claims to be selling George Washington's ax…but he admits that the handle has been replaced several times over the years and so has the blade. No piece of it remains that George ever touched but somehow it's still George Washington's ax.

The Sahara will be torn down…maybe not by its current owners, maybe by the next ones or the ones after. Along the way, it might be refurbished so totally that it won't bear any connection to the Sahara as it was when I played Blackjack there in the eighties, let alone when the Rat Pack played the Congo Room in the sixties. On one message board, I saw someone say, "We're losing our heritage." No, we lost that long ago. What we're losing now are some shabby businesses that couldn't keep up and which have some vague connection — sometimes in name only — to a long gone era.

Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is undergoing major revisions under a new director and a new book writer. The current version will play for another month or so and I'm curious to see if attendance will go up (because people want to see this much-talked-about version while they can) or down (because this version has been declared seriously broken). The show will close on April 17 so the changes can he rehearsed and then it will resume previews on May 12 and actually open on June 14. Obviously, those last two dates are subject to change.

I hope they pull it off. I know there are folks out there who think expensive spectaculars are choking Broadway, making it impossible to do a "little" show. I have no doubt theater would be better off if there wasn't so much money riding on every effort but I think Spider-Man is already an example of why huge budgets need to be avoided. It will forever remind producers that a $10 million budget can easily turn into a $20 million one and a $30 million one and eventually, $65 million. (Closing for a month will drive the total $$$ gamble up further.) Even if it's eventually profitable — and it has a long way to go before that will seem possible — few will want to take that risk.

I have nothing but the obvious to say about the horrible news out of Japan. This kind of thing depresses me…and also makes me angry in a way Hurricane Katrina made me angry. Money couldn't have prevented Katrina just as it can't stop an earthquake…but it can make things better in the rescue/rebuild phase. If we wasted less money on foolish wars and silly political battles, we could have more to save lives, minimize suffering and put a lot of things back the way they were.

As I do when things of this tragic sort happen, I'm reminding you all about my favorite charity, Operation USA. There are many good ones out there but I'm quite certain that the cash I donate to Operation USA couldn't do any more good in anyone else's hands. Send what you can spare…and if you were thinking of donating to this website, send it to them instead.