Monthly Archives: August 2012

A. Barton Hinkle writes about what's at stake in this election. I doubt very many people will argue with a word of it.

I hope you got to see Phyllis Diller perform once the way you should see any great stand-up comedian: Live and doing a real set. You can't appreciate most of these folks in five-minute hunks on some talk show. Really. I didn't know how good Ms. Diller was until I saw her on a stage, twenty feet from me and not concerned with having to get a couple of quick laughs and get off. She was really wonderful.

She was, of course, a pioneer — a woman of the time when the only way a non-male could get up and do an act like that was to make fun of her appearance and sexuality. Diller, Totie Fields, the early Joan Rivers…all of them stepped up to the mike and told you how ugly they were, how their husbands wouldn't make love to them, etc. In a short set, Phyllis sometimes talked about nothing else. To say these ladies had it rough is pure underestimation. It was ten times as hard for them as it was for an Alan King or a Bob Newhart. Phyllis, because she came first, especially had a lot more walls to knock down…which she did so that others might not be kept out. It helped that she was very funny but it was essential that she also be very determined. That she was.

I wish I had a great tale of spending time with her, getting to know her, etc. I saw her in person on stages and she was often the guest when I went to see a TV show taped. I once saw her in one of Red Skelton's famous "dirty hour" rehearsals where Red was supposed to perform that week's script for a test audience of CBS employees…but would actually tell filthy, irrelevant jokes the whole time. Phyllis Diller was the guest and she was professional enough to at least try to do the lines on the cue cards as written. But just to keep up with Red at all, she had to ad-lib some pretty randy stuff and she was a lot funnier than he was. Or maybe just wittier.

My one in-person contact with her came when we were casting voices for a CBS cartoon show I did called Mother Goose and Grimm, based on the comic strip by Mike Peters. We needed a strong voice for Mother Goose and someone — it may have been Mike — thought of Phyllis Diller. She came in to audition for us and she was very, very good. The big problems turned out to be that she wanted a vast amount of money and for us to work around a schedule that had her out of town and unavailable every time we'd need her in town and available. She was a tough one to scratch off the list of possible Mother Gooses.

I did take the opportunity to ask her about those Skelton rehearsals and I got the following impression: That she wasn't particularly fond of Mr. Skelton and hated working his "dirty hours" but that was the job. She became the preeminent female stand-up of her time partly because there weren't a lot of applicants for the position but largely because she was willing to work hard and put up with a lot. Swapping penis jokes with Red Skelton was probably nowhere near the worst of it. That perseverance was what got her to the top.

Well, that and being very, very funny. You need that too and she was.

I should mention — since I have nothing better to do at this hour but sleep or write a script that's due — that I did a bit of an upgrade a few weeks ago to one of my other websites. It's Old L.A. Restaurants and it's about…well, what do you think a website called Old L.A. Restaurants would be about? Kardashians?

The thing some people don't get is this: It's not necessarily about the Old L.A. Restaurants that you went to. It's about the Old L.A. Restaurants that I went to. I have nothing to say about the Old L.A. Restaurants that I never went to. You'd think folks would understand that but, hey, we have a U.S. Congressman who thinks women cannot get pregnant from rape…and this man is a member of the House Science Committee.

That's the rule these days: When the science gets in the way of your worldview, don't worry. Just make up your own science.

If you're sick of political stuff — like, say, the two preceding paragraphs — drop by Old L.A. Restaurants and read about places where I used to dine. We're open the same hours as Denny's but the food's better.

Actor William Windom has died at the age of 88. Mr. Windom amassed a pretty impressive list of credits during his career but to some of us, he was first and foremost the star of My World and Welcome To It, a short-lived 1969 situation comedy on NBC that spun off of (some said, bastardized) the writings of James Thurber. Critics thought it was terrific, my friends and I thought it was terrific…and America watched something else at that hour. If you hear of anyone ever putting 'em out on DVD, let me know.

I met Windom but once. Around 1974, I was taking some courses at Santa Monica College and it was announced that late one weekday afternoon, he would be doing one performance of a new one-man show he was developing called Thurber. It had an interesting price of admission: You had to promise to stay around after and give him a "brutal critique."

I went. He came out at the beginning and told everyone he wasn't kidding about the "brutal" part. He said, approximately, "This is a show I intend to tour with and to try and take to Broadway. The critics will not be pushovers and the bookers will be even worse. I'd rather hear what's wrong with it from young, smart people like you now than from them then. Just be honest with me. I've been an actor for years. I can take it."

He then did the show, partly from book and partly from memory. It was assembled from the writings of you-know-who and he spoke as the man. For what little my opinion is ever worth, it seemed to me it could be a great show but that he was about 60% of the way there with it. The beginning was a lot funnier than the end and the biography stuff — Thurber talking about his life — kept getting lost in the readings of his stories, some of which were suggested as more autobiographical than they probably were intended by their maker. But Mr. Windom was an absolute pro.

When it came time for Brutal Critiques, they weren't all that brutal. Mine started silly. I got up and said, "I don't like your pants and I think you need to lose ten pounds and grow a mustache." Then I gave my serious view…and this was back when I was writing Road Runner comic books, rather than material for actors to perform. I remember discussing my comments with him and wondering: If and when I did start to write for people instead of comic book characters, would every actor be as rational and mature as William Windom? He was smart, he was introspective and he really, really cared about input. In the TV shows I later worked on, I rarely encountered that kind of give-and-take and candid, constructive suggestion. But then I never got to work with William Windom.

That's all I have in the way of a William Windom anecdote, I'm afraid. Wish there was more. Here's a short promo film narrated by Hugh Downs to preview My World and Welcome To It. The series lasted longer than this clip but not much longer…

A Baptist pastor calls Pat Robertson on the latest stupid remark. That could be a full-time job.

Dennis Wilson writes to ask…

I'm sure you've heard of the Tonight Show layoffs and Leno's pay cut. My question is, why would Leno sit still for this? The Tonight Show is still one of NBC's most profitable shows, and NBC doesn't appear to have a succession plan ready if Jay were to leave. (Moving Fallon to 11:30 p.m. would surely result in losses like those that resulted from moving Conan there, plus leave a hole in the currently profitable 12:30 a.m. slot.) Johnny would've walked. Why won't Jay?

I'm not sure Johnny would have walked. It probably would have depended to some extent on when.

There were a number of times in the first half of his Tonight career when Johnny said he'd quit if he didn't get what he wanted…and then he got what he wanted (or close enough to it) and all was fine. Would he have gone through with the threat? Maybe early in his run if he saw an opening to go someplace else and set up shop at much better terms. After a certain point though — around 1980, give or take a few years — he didn't threaten to quit and they didn't give him a reason to.

What would he have done if he had quit? Past some point, he was not going to dismantle The Tonight Show at NBC, move over to CBS, assemble a new series there with a partly-new staff, commit to stay there for multiple years and risk that the new venue would work as well as the old one had. David Letterman was 46 when he left NBC. Carson was 55 in 1980.

My sense of Johnny is that for the first decade or so, he hosted Tonight with the idea that he'd do that a while, then move on to something else — maybe a prime-time weekly variety show. He'd had one once, it had flopped and he had some desire to go back and do it right. But during the seventies, he seems to have realized that, first of all, that kind of variety show was going out of style. Also, they were a lot of work…probably a lot more than hosting Tonight on his many-days-off schedule. There was a very real worry that he could wind up ending his career on a failure, whereas staying at 11:30 he had a good chance to go out on top and set some kind of longevity record. Quitting just meant setting up shop elsewhere to try and do pretty much the same show…and there was no reason to try that. All it would have meant was more risk and more money…and NBC never refused to give him more money.

Mr. Carson always had an accurate idea of how much his show made for NBC and a pragmatic idea of what piece of that should be his. Then he and his lawyers would get it and that was that. During his years there, that number went ever-upward so he never had to deal with threatened rollbacks. Thus, we don't know for sure what he would have done in this situation.

These days, revenues in late night are declining. All the shows are down and they've all either taken cuts or will…with the possible exception of Craig Ferguson, whose show was already so cheap there's no room for cutting.

With regard to Jay, we don't know the numbers. Some reports say his program has been operating at the higher budget it had during the 10 PM experiment. If that's the case, it's reasonable to roll it back to a late night budget and I don't know why they've waited this long to do that. My guess would be that Leno has a little mystery percentage number in his head — "I get X% of what the show makes" — and that he's still in that ballpark.

One of the interesting things to me about Leno is that he does not seem to be motivated by money, at least with regard to The Tonight Show. He's loaded and could make as much or more playing Vegas more often. But more intriguing (and unusual) is that he isn't weighed down with grand ego issues. There are stars in this business who spend a lot of time crying, "My network doesn't love me," and getting all pissy at real and imagined slights…like their picture isn't prominent enough on the studio wall or they weren't mentioned in some article on the network's history. Leno seems to care very little about that kind of thing. He appears to be driven primarily by the desire to keep moving…to keep doing shows, to keep putting out product.  During the 10PM/Conan debacle, he might have gained leverage had he opted to sit out the balance of a contract and be off the air for some time.  He always chose not to do that.

He's endured a lot of stuff at NBC — top execs there working against him, offering his job to others, etc. — that would have caused some others to storm out of there and never go near the network again. Leno seems to take an unemotional look at where he'd be if he stayed and where he'd be if he walked. Then he factors in what it means to his staff and he stays. A friend of mine who's close to him says, "Jay's a stand-up comic at heart so all he wants is the best stand-up gig in the world. That to him is the Tonight Show monologue spot." I can see that.

When he got kicked off Tonight to make room for Conan O'Brien, Jay could have gone almost anywhere and for more money. ABC and Fox were both ready to set him up in a competing show. But he was 59 years old and well-entrenched at NBC with that staff…and there was also that problem of being off the air for many months.  So he elected to stay there and try to do that 10 PM show he shouldn't have tried to do. If he didn't jump to Fox at 59, he's not going to do it at age 62. I think all of late night TV's due for a shakeup in the next few years. There are probably more cuts to come for all. My guess is Leno will stay as long as they let him and he's getting that X%. And then he'll happily do stand-up gigs all over the world for the rest of his life.

Recently, we connected you to amazing footage of Bai Yun, a panda at the San Diego Zoo, giving birth to a baby.

How do you top that? Here's a panda named Sixue giving birth to two cubs, a male and a female, at the Wolong Giant Panda Wild Breeding Center in China's southern Sichuan province. Since a mother panda can only care for one baby at a time, the male has been sent to some sort of Panda Day Care Center to be nursed artificially.

I'm hoping one of these days they open a Wolong Giant Panda Wild Breeding Center near me. There's room for one in a strip mall down on Wilshire but they'll probably stick a Chipotle Grill there instead…

This past Comic-Con International, we presented one of the Bill Finger Awards to Steve Skeates, a clever guy who wrote a lot of fine comics in the late sixties through about the early eighties. It was one of our more popular choices for the honor.

Steve was written about in two hometown newspapers. Here's a link to one of them and here's a link to the other. In the spirit of the previous message, I only spotted one real error in either article…and wouldn't you know it? It's from me. I'm quoted — and I assume I said this although I knew better — saying that Steve had never been to Comic-Con before. He had, once. That just goes to show you shouldn't believe everything I say, either. I certainly don't.

Thanks to Marty Golia for letting me know about these. By the way, the guy who stuck Skeates' name in an episode of the Plastic Man TV cartoon was Steve Gerber.

Here, thanks to a referral from our pal James H. Burns, we have a nice but error-ridden piece on two veteran comic artists, Al Plastino and Joe Giella. The Giella part ain't bad but he didn't draw The Phantom for DC Comics. He worked on the syndicated newspaper strip by that name. The article also leaves out the most important part of the anecdote Joe tells about his first job…

It was penciled by Mike Sekowsky and Joe was given the job of inking it. He lost the pages on the subway. The next morning, sure that his career was over before it had begun, he admitted his error to editor Stan Lee who told him, basically, "Well, now you have to redraw the whole thing because we're not going to pay Sekowsky to draw it again." Drawing a story was then beyond Giella's level of ability and he didn't know what he was going to do. Then Sekowsky heard about it and told Joe (then, a total stranger to him), "Don't worry. I'll redraw it for you." And he did. Joe offered to pay Mike a few dollars a week out of his paycheck until Mike had received his usual rate. Mike said, "No, just help out some other kid in trouble some day."

See? Isn't that a better story than the way the reporter told it? It's also true.

The part about Plastino is less accurate. No, he didn't co-create "The Legion of Justice." He drew the first story of The Legion of Super-Heroes. No, he didn't use "…his own hairstyle as the basis for Superman's cowlick." He drew the same one the artists before him had been drawing. It says he did a four-year stint on Batman and people will think that means he drew Batman comic books but he never did. He worked on that character's syndicated newspaper strip.

Eyes may widen at the claim he did "…some work on Peanuts during the period when creator Charles Schulz was out sick." To the extent that suggests Plastino ghosted the newspaper strip, it's flat-out wrong and Mr. Schulz got very angry when anyone claimed that. My understanding is that at one point, someone at the syndicate decided to line up a good ghost artist for the strip in case they ever needed one to replace Schulz either for health or contractual reasons. Plastino did up very impressive samples but Schulz never needed replacement or ghosts and the samples Plastino did were never published. I suppose it's possible he did some art on Charlie Brown merchandise so the claim of "some work on Peanuts" might have a little accuracy to it but it's sure misleading.

Lastly, the reporter says of the man, "He also is a frequent guest at Comic-Con, the popular convention for fans of comic books and graphic novels." That suggests the Comic-Con International in San Diego…a convention which Plastino has never attended. He's been invited a few times and has always declined. I believe he has made a few appearances at smaller conventions closer to home but he actually has not been very visible at cons. Maybe he'll reconsider coming out to San Diego some year. It would be great to let his fans out here meet him and honor him for his impressive body of work.

Sorry if I sound irate about matters of little consequence here but I do this for a reason. It reminds me that not everything you read in a newspaper is accurate and that I should apply a certain amount of skepticism to the front page…where things do matter.

Kevin Drum explains in pretty clear language the problem with Paul Ryan's Medicare proposal. If you see a proper response to this from the Ryan side, let me know.

Groucho's not as funny in Spanish…

The Nutty Professor musical plays its last performance in Nashville this weekend. Judging by this interview with the producers, they don't seem to know what happens to it next…which means that everything shuts down. The show closes, the sets and costumes go in storage somewhere and the cast members return to their normal lives while the producers seek a new place to play the show and the deal to get it there.

A friend of mine who attended a performance sent the following with the wish that I withhold his name…

The show I saw was good not great. I can certainly imagine it with more work being shaped into a Broadway-worthy production but they're not there yet. I suppose it got more difficult to get to that point when Marvin Hamlisch died but if I were the producer, I sure wouldn't give up on this show. Michael Andrew is very good in the lead role but he is basically doing a Jerry Lewis impression for the entire show. In all the press, Jerry wrote about encouraging Andrew to find his own characterization and to not just do an imitation and what he does is an imitation.

That's not necessarily wrong. It may be very right. The audience isn't there to see Michael Andrew. They're there to see Jerry. There seemed to be a lot of disappointment at the performance I attended because Jerry was nowhere to be seen. Before the show, that's what people were talking about. Will Jerry appear on stage at the end? Is he in the house? I gather he sometimes comes out for the final bows and makes a little speech and sometimes he doesn't. Sitting behind me were people who'd brought things for him to autograph if they got the chance. As we left, I heard one of them say "Maybe he'll be out in the lobby" but of course he wasn't. The theater was not full, by the way. We paid full price for our tickets because we were driving there from out of town and wanted to make sure we had seats but then as the date and we got closer to Nashville, I saw lots of places I could have gotten tickets for half-price.

The cast is very energetic and the dancing is very good. I'm rooting for this show to succeed but it's not ready for New York now. I hope wherever they go, they either keep Jerry off the stage completely or have him appear every night. The evening ended on a bit of a downer for some people because they had seen all these press photos of him on stage and thought they were going to get to see Jerry Lewis in person and then they didn't.

I can see that being a problem…but also maybe a secret weapon in a way. Anyway, I hope it goes on and I have a feeling it will. As a producer once told me about a project I was involved in, "It's all in the hands of the guys who control the pursestrings now." That one didn't go forward…but that one didn't have Jerry Lewis attached.

I've been reading a lot of articles about competing visions for Medicare. I'm obviously no authority and what I think carries all the weight of a guy who writes silly cartoons for a living. But I'm kinda interested from a journalism and voter standpoint, marvelling at the dysfunction of the national debate on all this.

My conclusion? My conclusion is that what Paul Ryan has disclosed of his plan — and what Mitt Romney has revealed of how much of his plan parallels that — is not enough for any reasonable person to evaluate. It reminds me of the many times my agent or lawyer has received an offer for my services and I ask, "Is it a good deal?" and he replies, "They've sent me a partial offer that looks like a good deal. I think they're expecting you to say yes or even start arranging your life to do it before they send us the rest of the terms." Often, when they do, the good deal doesn't seem like such a good deal.

Here, Kevin Drum asks a very basic, fundamental question about Ryan's Medicare proposals…and I think (but can't be sure) that this is one of the parts of it that Romney has embraced. Or might embrace. If you've followed his statements on this, you can see why it's hard to tell. But I don't think anyone can really say how his plan would work or if it would work without the answer to the question Kevin asks.

You can't fault Romney or Ryan for trying to be as vague about their plans as possible. They'd like to get elected and any plan to change something as vital as Medicare is going to have provisions some folks won't like. But I can fault reporters who are trying to discuss this thing and write about it and talk to these men without wringing out more details.

The Obama Administration isn't trying to hide the details of its vision for Medicare. It can't because they're all there in the Affordable Care Act. But it's also not being too forthcoming about what else, if anything, it wants to change. There's probably something and it would be nice if we knew what it was.

So basically what I'm saying here is that the various plans for changing/fixing Medicare that we're being asked to consider are a lot like those half-an-offers I sometimes receive. And the press is like if my agent or attorney expected me to accept or reject without hearing the rest of the terms.