Monthly Archives: June 2012

Number two hundred and forty-eight in a series…

Back in the seventies, very little was known about the men and occasional women who'd written and drawn "funny animal" comic books for Western Publishing. This was the Dell line of comics and later the Gold Key line. (If you don't know the difference, you need to read this.) Because I was working for Western, I learned some names and some art styles, and historian-types were always writing me to ask who'd drawn this Daisy Duck story or who was the guy who drew Clarabelle Cow with such huge feet. Whenever possible, I would try to help out.

There was a gent who lived in…I want to say Sweden but it may have been some other country. I'm not certain now of his name or location so let's just say he was Olaf from Sweden. He would send me huge packages of Xeroxes from Disney comics and letters demanding (not asking, demanding) that I immediately identify all the artists and ship the packages back to him…at my expense, I might add. I think I'd answered two or three questions for a friend of his and he had taken that as some indication that I would answer hundreds for him.

One of his packages would arrive on Monday and I'd look at it and think, "Jeez, it will take weeks to tell this guy what he wants to know," and I'd set it aside to deal with at some later date. At a later date — three or four days later — I would get another package from him with 300 more Xeroxes and a letter scolding me because he had not yet received the previous package with every i.d. he had requested. The letter would say something like…

The geniuses who created the Disney Comics labored in shameful anonymity like plantation workers flogged at the whim of their masters. Insensitive, uncaring people such as yourself, Mr. Evanier, perpetuate this injustice by withholding their identities and compounding the insult to these great artists.

And that was one of Olaf's nicer ones.

Well, you can imagine how eager I was to sit down and spend the time figuring out for him who'd inked Scamp #9. I didn't even know what he wanted to do with all this information — keep it to himself for all I knew. So I let his packages pile up and then one day when the latest cover letter had compared me to animal droppings — and not favorably, I might add — I tossed them in the trash and wrote Olaf a brief letter that suggested he have Captain Hook give him a reacharound. I don't think I used quite those words but that was the general sentiment.

Olaf wrote me back saying I was urinating on downtrodden, neglected artists and would someday be judged by my maker for my vile treachery. Well, I'd already known the second part since I created the Hallowed Ranks of Marveldom. After I got this note, I figured that was the last I'd hear from Olaf. Not so.

Two or three months later, I was at a San Diego Comic Con, which is what we used to call what we now call the Comic-Con International. A local Disney fan came up to me there and informed me that Olaf was somewhere on the premises, having flown over from Sweden. If indeed he was from Sweden, I forget. Anyway, imagining a nasty and insulting guy, I decided to avoid anyone who looked too blonde and tan…and I managed to do so for most of the con.

The last day, I was talking with a group of people and one was a slim young gent who was so shy and soft-spoken, I had to ask him to repeat everything he said. We were talking maybe ten minutes about Disney Comics when he turned and something that had been blocking his name badge was suddenly not blocking it. That's when I saw his name. It was Olaf: Exactly the opposite of what I'd imagined.

And within moments, I realized what the problem was. He wasn't an outraged, rude Swedish guy. He was a Swedish guy who didn't write English very well.

It was not unlike the Monty Python sketch — which I hadn't seen at the time — in which the Hungarian guy thinks he's saying the English equivalent of "Can you direct me to the station?" is actually saying "Please fondle my bum." Or the tale of the man who'd just learned a little English who went to an art show and said "These paintings are worthless" when what he wanted to say was "These paintings are priceless." Olaf knew the English words but not well enough to apply them in the right way.

After that when I read fanzines, I often suspected that even a lot of folks reared in English simply did not write well enough to accurately convey their feelings. They were coming across in print angrier and harsher than they actually were.

This often seems to be the case on the Internet. I've gotten e-mails from folks who seemed inexplicably furious with me and I've then phoned them or met them at a con and found out that no, they weren't angry at all. There's a skill to conveying an accurate tone in what you write and these people were simply lacking in that skill.

I think it's getting better. When this mode of communication was in its primitive state of computer bulletin boards, you had a lot of folks participating who were unused to writing. When calling by phone replaced communicating by mail, a lot of folks let their writing skills atrophy or never developed many in the first place. Now, e-mail is a near-necessity and people are learning or relearning how to express themselves at a keyboard. Which doesn't mean they all do it well.

I got one more letter from Olaf after the convention thanking me for our conversation and telling me I was a blight on humanity. I'm guessing he meant to say something very flattering but he just couldn't find the words.

The "word" on Richard Dawson, who has died at the age of 79, is that he set out to be Peter Sellers or Jack Lemmon and was frustrated that he wound up being Bill Cullen. He first came to this country as a comic actor — a pretty good one as evidenced by a guest-starring spot on The Dick Van Dyke Show, regular stints on Hogan's Heroes and Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In and other gigs, some of them even dramatic ones. Along the way, he started picking up extra bucks doing game shows as a panelist and occasional host. He was so good on the panel of Match Game that it makers, Goodson-Todman, gave him the job of hosting a new show they invented called Family Feud. This was reportedly after their first choice, Geoff Edwards, passed on it to his presumed regret. The show was a monster hit and before long, all else Dawson had done was forgotten and he was a Game Show Host. Even his one big job in a movie — The Running Man with Arnold Schwarzenegger — cast him as a Game Show Host.

I'm sure he appreciated the money but it's easy to believe, as rumor had it, that he felt he was using about 25% of what he had to offer. At one point, he got some bad press because TV Guide wanted to do a cover with the top quizzzmasters (as Lou Grant would say) all posing together and he refused to participate. It came across like he thought he was above Bob Barker and Alex Trebek and the others and too good to be grouped in with them.

I had one brief (very brief) encounter with Mr. Dawson around 1983. I was working on a show that was taping at ABC's old studio at Prospect and Talmadge. Family Feud was taping one episode after another in rapid succession across the hall and we shared a common corridor.

It was apparently Dawson's custom to do a formal "goodbye" with each family when their time on the show was over. By the rules of conduct, he was not allowed to have much contact with contestants before the game was played but after, he'd pose for photos, sign autographs and talk to them like a human being, not a Game Show Host. There was a family that had lost big and some of its members were taking it hard, not so much because of the money they hadn't won but because they thought they'd just plain looked stupid. Taping was to commence on the following episode without them and the Stage Manager was diplomatically hustling Dawson, who had changed into a different suit, to get out into position to be introduced so they could start.

Dawson instead was standing in the hallway with the departing family, taking a surprising interest in seeing that they left there feeling good about their appearance and themselves. The Stage Manager kept saying "Richard, they're ready for you" and Richard would say "They can wait" and resume telling the family members that it was just a game, that all games have losers and there's no disgrace in losing on something as inconsequential as Family Feud. I was running back and forth past them putting out some fire on the program I was doing but I caught snatches of what he was saying and it seemed like compassionate, pragmatic advice. It also sounded like it was helpful in its goal, which was to get those people to view their brief moments on Family Feud not as a low point in their lives and not even as a high point but as an event of little consequence.

A young woman who was in tears began hugging him like he'd just saved her child's life. Then she suddenly realized she had moistened the exquisite suit he was wearing and she practically shrieked in horror at what she'd done. He took her in his arms, allowed her to cry some more on his jacket and said in a calming voice, "Don't worry about it. Do you have any idea how many of these suits I have here?"

All this time, I was navigating around them in the corridor and as he hugged this young woman and I walked past, he said to me, "Pretend you didn't see this." I said, "I'll tell people it was Gene Rayburn." He said, "Thank you." Then he added, "And Gene will appreciate it, too."

Finally, the family was calmed and they left. The Stage Manager told Dawson, "We're twenty behind," meaning twenty minutes.  That's a lot to be behind when you're taping many shows per day. Dawson said, "Well, we're going to be farther behind because I have to go change my suit." But before he did, he made a point of coming over to me and apologizing for the traffic jam in the hallway. He didn't know who I was or what I was doing in the other studio but he said, "I hope we didn't cause you any problems." I muttered something about how if he promised not to kiss me, we'd call it even and he so promised and hurried off to change his outfit.

I later heard stories of Richard Dawson not being the nicest person to the crew, to other performers and especially to fans who recognized him in public. I have no idea if they were true or not. I've heard such stories about stars and known for sure they weren't true…and also heard gossip that was, if anything, understated. But he sure went way beyond the call of duty with that family that afternoon and he didn't have to come over and apologize to me, either. I'm going to choose to believe he was always like that and I hope you'll join me.

Jonathan H. Adler lays out the Conservative case for acknowledging and taking action on the issue of climate change.

Shirley Jones recalls the making of the movie of The Music Man…

Hey, you want to read a funny online comic that's probably not like anything you've ever seen? Take a gander at Marc Jackson's Man From Space. The guy did a nice job with it and deserves more attention.

Hard to believe, I know, but it's five and a half weeks until this year's gala Comic-Con International in San Diego. And yes, I'm aware some of you still haven't unpacked from the last one. That's just how fast time passes now that we've lowered the Age of Celebrity in this country down to around 14.

If you are without admission to Comic-Con this year, you may well be outta luck. Try every possible avenue except buying from unofficial sources or asking me. If you are attending, here are a few tips…

• Wear the most comfortable shoes you own, regardless of how ugly they may be.
• Before the con, take the time to study the Programming Guide. It'll be on the con website a week or two before the event and you should go over it and make notes on (a) what you want to see and (b) what you'll go see instead if your first choices are full.
• It also wouldn't hurt to study the map of the exhibit hall that will be on the site. Get a sense of how the place is laid out and where the displays that interest you are most likely to be found. Writing down booth numbers is also a dandy idea.
• Plan where and when you're going to eat. The food at the convention center is pretty bad even by the standards of convention center food. Best thing I've ever found are the hamburgers they sell out on the back terrace during lunch hours but they get worse every year. Last year, they were bad approximations of Burger King so this year, they'll probably be down to the level of Carl's Jr.
• That back terrace which overlooks the marina is a great place to go, sit for a while and breathe non-convention air.
• Bring more money than you expect to need there. You can always take some home if you don't spend it all. Which you will.
• If you're driving down, figure out where you're going to park.  When you get there and it's full, think about taking the Amtrak train next time.
• Make sure you have along a watch or a cell-phone that tells time. The hall will have more people dressed as Luke Skywalker than it will clocks.
• It's impossible to find people in that place and cell reception can be spotty. If you're hoping to hook up with friends, it's a good idea to plan a time and place in advance. A lot of folks use the DC booth as a location since it's centrally-located and there's often someone attractive hanging around dressed as Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Black Canary or the Golden-Age Green Lantern.
• Remember that the con is not just the exhibit hall. Most of the programming is upstairs and there are always fun things transpiring outside the convention center, mostly on the southeast end.  The crowds out there may also make you long for the crowds inside the building.

And lastly, here's the most important piece of advice I can give you…so vital I'm giving it its own bullet-point…

• Relax. Don't stress. Accept the reality that you cannot see every event you want to see, meet every celeb you want to meet, acquire every treasure you wish to acquire. I've been going to these things since Richard M. Nixon was President and I have never, not even when the con had under 500 attendees, ever seen anyone "do everything." You do not have to function at the pace of the convention. Function at your own pace and take in as much of the con as seems possible. You can really have a great time there if you don't put pressure on yourself to do too much.

So that's my main advice. Also, you might want to spend every waking minute of the next five and a half weeks reading Tom Spurgeon's convention tips. He makes it sound like a much grander ordeal and daunting task than it is but everything he writes is true to some extent except for where he says Batton Lash is the King of the Friendly Pros On The Comic-Con Floor. Batton is a very nice gent but compared to Sergio Aragonés, he is that face-eating guy in Florida.  As are we all.

Batton will, by the way, be on one of the twelve (so far) panels I'm hosting at the convention — a tribute to Joe Simon and Jerry Robinson. Others include the usual two Cartoon Voice panels (Saturday and Sunday), the Sunday panel on how to break into that field, Quick Draw! (Saturday), the Jack Kirby Tribute Panel, Cover Story, the Sergio/Mark Show and I can't find my list at the moment. I'm currently finalizing the lineup of folks who'll be on these so let me know if there's someone you really want to see on, say, the Cartoon Voice Panel.

Or I tell you what I could really use help with: There will be no Golden Age or Silver Age Panel because we just don't have folks there who qualify. But we are now doing something called That 70's Panel with writers and artists who did a lot of work in comics in that decade. I know there will be many of those at the con but I'm not sure yet who'll be around and am thus unsure who to invite. If you have some thoughts, I'd welcome them.

I think that's all for now. Actually, I hope that's all for now but will probably think of something else in twenty minutes.

Number two hundred and forty-seven in a series…

Earlier today, I told you about my friend Valerie Perri who I knew before she became an important star of musical comedy. We have here now a fuzzy but watchable clip of her starring in Evita in the original Chicago production of the show.

I saw her in it two and a half times at the Shubert in L.A., the half being a viewing of Act One from the wings. I was over in Century City for a meeting at ABC. When I left, people were going into the Shubert for a matinee and because I had some time to kill, I went over to the stage door and told the man there, "I'm a friend of Valerie Perri's." Usually they call and check but to my surprise, he just let me in. My whole time there, in fact, no one ever asked who I was or questioned my right to be on the backstage premises.

I didn't want to disturb Valerie when she was about to go on so I wandered over to an off-stage post and watched the whole first act standing there, dodging as set pieces and actors went on and off. At one point, the fellow playing Che Guevara (not Mandy Patinkin; his replacement) crashed into me and he apologized more profusely than I did, even though I was the one who wasn't supposed to be there.

I stood there for the entire first act waiting to either be thrown out or for Valerie to have an exit on that side of the stage and notice me. Neither happened. Having killed the time I had to kill, I left at Intermission and on the way out, Che Guevara spotted me and apologized three more times. The real Che wouldn't have apologized once.

I liked that visit better than the previous two times but I thought I liked that show. Then a few years later when I was dragged to a production of Evita that she was not in, I realized I didn't like Evita. What I liked was Valerie. You know how sometimes a favorite star can be in a really, really bad movie but you enjoy watching it anyway because of them?

So I don't like Evita. I know there are some folks who reflexively loathe everything Andrew Lloyd Webber has ever done but I don't feel that way. Matter of fact, just about the only thing I like about Evita if Valerie isn't in it is his music. I think most of the lyrics are silly, written by someone who wasn't sure if he was writing for people who lived in Argentina in 1952 or New York in the seventies. And the book is a story that is of no interest to me about people who are of no interest to me. There are some nice moments of musical dramatics and when the budget is sufficient, some great staging tricks…but they do not add up to a great musical.

Here's a nice moment with Valerie playing Eva Perón. A friend of mine who saw her in it also saw Patti LuPone, who first played the role on Broadway. He said to me, "I thought Valerie was the better singer but I really liked the fact that with Patti, you couldn't understand the words." With some shows, it almost helps…

I don't drink soft drinks or live in New York but I don't like Mayor Bloomberg's proposal to ban large cups of such beverages. For one thing, the plan as stated seems to be filled with loopholes. What about buying two drinks? And lately, every fast food place I go into seems to offer unlimited free refills.

More to the point, there's a limit as to how much The State (even when it's The City) should be controlling what people put into their bodies. I could maybe see the justification for saying, "Look, because people drink this stuff, it creates public health problems that cost the city $X million per year so let's impose a tax that will recoup that money." But that's not what Bloomberg wants and if you did pass that, you'd have to start controlling the portion sizes of french fries and the packaging sizes of M&M's and the tonnage of Whoppers.

Meanwhile in similar news, I voted by-mail the other day on the proposal here in California that would impose a new hefty tax on cigarettes. I don't smoke, will never smoke and couldn't dislike smoking more. It's killed (literally) friends of mine, put other friends in the hospital and I find it repulsive to be around. Still, I have some sympathy for smokers being treated like lepers. It's legal and they have the right to do it to themselves as long as it doesn't affect me. I feel this way about a lot of things including the drinking of alcohol, the eating of cole slaw and the watching of Jimmy Kimmel.

I was conflicted about how to vote on this because after doing a bit of research on the 'net, I came to the conclusion that the "anti" campaign is a matter of tobacco companies spending millions of dollars to spread what are mostly bogus facts. My natural instinct is to want to see a campaign like that fail…but that's not reason enough. It is, after all, possible to make a dishonest case for a good cause.

My problem is that I don't think this is about discouraging smoking and don't think it's the government's place to do anything more than disseminate accurate information about what it does to you. I think this is more a matter of: "The state needs money. I don't want my taxes raised and since I don't smoke, let's stick to it the smokers." That doesn't seem right to me. Hey, I don't go to football games or eat Mexican food. Let's balance the budget by imposing a hefty tax on football tickets and tostadas. That's not how government and taxation are supposed to work.

I went back and forth on this one and finally decided to vote against it. Polls say it'll pass by a good margin so I'm not regretting my decision. But if it passes or fails by one vote, I'm going to worry I did the wrong thing.

Cartoonist Jen Sorensen writes an open letter (comic strip) to the Supreme Court about health insurance.

Funny how a picture on the Internet can jog your memory…and with me, one jog always leads to nine others. When I tell anecdotes, I have been known to stray wildly from topic to topic with no apparent connection…but there's always one somewhere in my mind. It may be underwater but it's in there.

I recently came across this image of the now-eradicated Shubert Theater in Century City which I used before on my site. I found it back then on the web and looked to see whose it was so I could write for permission to use it on my site. To my surprise, it turned out to be someone I knew: Alan Light, founder of the The Buyer's Guide to Comic Fandom…a publication for which I'd written and one that is still being published by others as the Comic Buyer's Guide. Alan graciously okayed my borrowing and I ran it…but didn't look that closely at it.

If I had, I would have seen — as you will if you enlarge it — that the show then playing at the Shubert was Beatlemania, which would place it around early 1978. At least, that's when I saw Beatlemania there. You may recall the show which starred four men who looked and sounded a lot like John, Paul, George and Ringo if you half-closed your eyes and had forgiving ears.  They performed an hour or two of Beatles' hits, morphing in style and dress through the era when them guys was fab. For most attendees, it was kind of like, "What would it be like to attend the ultimate Beatles concert?" and I could certainly understand and even savor a bit of that fantasy. I wasn't a maniacal Beatles fan (like some people I know, Shelly) but I certainly liked most of their music.

What I couldn't understand was why the show's cast recording sold a single copy.  It reportedly sold quite a few.  At the time, there were many record albums — yes, record albums — which collected actual Beatles hits (meaning: performed by the Beatles)  in various aggregations.  There were even a couple that contained all the same songs that were replicated in Beatlemania. So you could buy the real Beatles performing those tunes for $6.98 or you could buy the recording of four actors and a bunch of musicians trying to sound just like the real Beatles for $9.98.

Okay, explain to me why anyone would opt for the latter. I'll wait.

I went to see Beatlemania because a friend of mine named Valerie Klemow wanted to see it…and she wanted us to pretend we were seeing the real Beatles. The premise of our evening was that from the moment I picked her up, all through dinner and the show and going home, we would pretend those were the real Beatles up there. I was to say nothing to destroy the illusion..and I did a good job of it except for the moment when I muttered something about "Paul's" accent sounding more like liverwurst than Liverpool. But I'll tell you what else I remember…

Earlier that day, my agent had sent me out to meet a nice lady named Bonny Dore, who was in charge of development or production or something (I suspect, everything) at Krofft Entertainment. That's "Krofft" as in "Sid and Marty Krofft." I didn't meet Sid and Marty that day but I met Bonny and she interviewed me for a staff writing position on an upcoming series.  I always go to such meetings with an attitude of, at the outside, "Gee, it would be nice if I got this but it won't bother me much if I don't."  That's the most I ever feel in terms of hopeful expectation.  Sometimes on the way out, it's "Gee, I hope they don't offer me that" or "If they do offer, I'm saying no."  But I never think that life as I know it will end or even be much worse if they opt to hire someone else.

…though I admit I did want to work for the Kroffts.  I didn't like all their shows but I liked enough of them.  And even the ones I didn't like looked like they'd be fun and educational to work on. Also, I'd recently separated amicably from my writing partner and this, if I got it, would be my first-ever TV writing job being hired as a solo. So on both fronts, it was kind of a big deal or at least as big as I ever allow these things to get.

At intermission at Beatlemania, I went to a pay phone in the lobby (remember pay phones?) and used a beeper to access my Phone-Mate answering machine at home.  Remember Phone-Mate answering machines — the kind you couldn't access over the phone without using a little beeper? I used mine and heard a message from my then-agent, Bernie Weintraub, telling me, "Congratulations! You start Monday working for the Kroffts!" Come to think of it, remember when all agents were named Bernie?

I've had hundreds of jobs and professional associations over the years, some lasting a few days; others, a few months.  I've had four or five that have lasted a few decades and working with Sid and Marty is/was one.  I say "is/was" because though it's been a few years, Marty always has a dozen projects soon to blossom and I expect to be involved in one or the other…maybe. Anyway, it all started that evening.

I also have this memory of that night: Valerie was a talented but then-largely-unknown actress-singer. At one point, she pointed towards the Shubert proscenium and said, "Someday, I'll be performing on that stage."

Usually, you hear that kind of talk and you think, "Uh-huh, yeah, well good luck to you with that one." That's probably what I thought that night. But not all that long after, I found myself sitting in the Shubert Theater watching the first L.A. production of the Andrew Lloyd Webster musical Evita and the woman on that stage playing Evita was, yes, Valerie.  This would have been a good enough story if she'd been in the chorus but no, she had the lead role and I wasn't the only person who thought she was incredible in it. Critics concurred.

By then, she'd married someone else, taken his surname and become Valerie Perri. She's married to another someone else now but she's still indecently talented. Carolyn and I ran into her and her spouse last week when we went to see that great new production of Follies and I immediately asked her, "Why aren't you in this?" And then I answered my own question by saying, "Oh, I know. It's because you're not old enough!" Which she isn't but someday she will be and she'll be great in that show. Here's her website. If you ever see her playing in anything near you, order tickets immediately.

I have other special memories of the Shubert.  I'll post a few more of them in the days to come.

Number two hundred and forty-six in a series…