Monthly Archives: May 2013

Or depending on which time zone you're in, it may be today. Let's just say it's Wednesday…

Wednesday is when your legendary host Stu Shostak welcomes Dick Van Dyke and his lovely bride Arlene Silver for a long, live and lively interview. Folks who read this blog know that Mr. Van Dyke is one of my favorite people on the planet. Which is no big deal because he's the favorite of just about everyone. How can you not love Dick Van Dyke, a star performer for over fifty years…and the worst thing anyone can find to say about him is that he didn't do a great accent in what was otherwise a stellar performance in a classic motion picture? I'm serious. That's about the most negative thing I've ever heard uttered about the guy in more than half a century. Oh, yeah. My Aunt thought he was too skinny.

He had me a few weeks into The Dick Van Dyke Show, the best (I think) situation comedy ever done. Then you've got Bye Bye Birdie and Mary Poppins and The New Dick Van Dyke Show and The Comic and Diagnosis Murder and so many others and hey, when will they put out The Art of Love on DVD? That was my favorite Dick Van Dyke movie that nobody ever mentions.

Anyway, Stu's got Dick on his show and maybe more exciting is that he's got Dick's new bride and partner-in-life, Arlene. You know how sometimes you see a couple and you don't get why they're together, what one of them could possibly see in the other? This is not one of those couples. She was one of the most in-demand makeup artists in the business when they met a few years ago at the SAG Awards. I hope Stu gets them to talk about how they got together because they really are ideal for one another.

You can and should listen live to the broadcast by going to the Stu's Show website at the appropriate time. On the West Coast, the appropriate time is 4 PM. It's live to the world so that's 6 PM in Chicago, 7 PM in New York and 7 AM the next morning in Kuala Lumpur. Don't laugh. Everyone in Kuala Lumpur listens to Stu's Show. The festivities run at least two hours each week and sometimes runs longer.

Listening live is free. If you miss it and still wanna hear it, about a half-hour after the webcast, you can purchase it and download it at the same site for the bargain price of 99 cents. Or to get an even better bargain, order three episodes and get a fourth one for no additional charge. But come on! It's Dick Van Dyke! How can you miss this one?  And congrats to Stu.  You've sure come a long way from back when your idea of a guest was me.

Stop-motion animation would seem to be a dying art in the era of CGI. That it was ever an art had a lot to do with Ray Harryhausen, who died today in London at the age of 92. He didn't invent the technique; just fell in love with it after seeing King Kong…and returning to see it something like eighty jillion times. By the fifties when he supervised special effects for films like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, he was the Rembrandt of stop-motion or maybe the Van Gogh or Picasso. Whoever he was, he was the master and everyone else who's done it since has acknowledged him as such.

Details of his career can be found in obits like this one…so I'll just brag that I was able to meet and dine several times with Mr. Harryhausen, usually because we were both hanging around Julius Schwartz and/or Forrest Ackerman. He was a delightful man who was serious about his accomplishments but at the same time, humble about them. I always asked him if he had any plans to animate Julie or Forry who, in their later years, could have used the treatment he gave to other kinds of dinosaurs.

When I was around him, I observed something that I assume was a constant in his life. Guys (always guys, no girls) around my age would approach him, pay him the deserved compliments, then say, "When I was ten, I made a film in my backyard and I animated…" and here they would describe admittedly-dreadful attempts to replicate what Harryhausen did, only with an 8mm camera, a cheap and inadequate model of some kind, and only the vaguest clue as to how to make that model move. For those of you who don't even have the vaguest clue: What you need to do is to train a camera on your model, lock it down on a tripod, then take one frame of film, move the model slightly, take another frame, move it ever-so-slightly, take another frame, etc. It takes a long, long time and doing it in your backyard is Mistake #1 because it can take all day to achieve a few seconds of finished film and the lighting is never consistent when you're outside.

One time, I told Ray that I'd tried it, too — and I said to him, "I learned a new technique and I wondered if you'd mind if I told you about it…because it might help you in your work." He looked at me like I was completely out of my mind. Believe me: I know that look. This was like a kid who'd learned how to remove a splinter presuming to give advice to a top brain surgeon…but Harryhausen was polite and willing to hear me out. I said, "I find that it enhances the animation if you can manage to accidentally get your hands into the shot every seven or eight frames." I then experienced one of those horrible "Uh-oh, he doesn't get it" moments before he threw back his head and laughed. He had a good laugh.

He said, "You'd be amazed how many kids come up to me and tell me they tried to do what I do." I wasn't amazed because even in our limited time together, I'd seen it. He then said something I wish I could quote here verbatim about how people said his legacy was all those great movies but he thought maybe it was all those kids. Few of them went on to actually do stop-motion for a profession but a lot became animators in other senses and a lot became writers or other kinds of filmmakers. You have to admire a guy who inspired so many creative people…and who was just about the best at what he himself did.

After four decades and 3000+ performances, Cathy Rigby has turned in her fairy dust and retired from Peter Panning. She's done it all over the world and retired before…but it sure looks like this time, she ain't coming back to the role. Last Sunday in Boston, she gave her final performance.

I saw her in it many times and thought she was terrific. Having grown up with the Mary Martin Peter Pan on TV, I should probably reject the notion of anyone else as The Boy Who Never Grew Up. Nope. First time I saw someone else play Peter, it was Sandy Duncan and I thought she was as good as Mary Martin if not better. Then I saw Ms. Rigby and I liked her better than either of them. I'm sorry I won't be able to see her do it again. Here's a little video ad for the production you now cannot see…

And here's some video of her curtain speech at the last performance. If ever a performer deserved this moment…

It's been revealed that New Jersey governor Chris Christie recently had lap band surgery. Good for him. I'm amused that pundits are discussing this only as a sign that he has designs on the White House. I mean, what other reason could a morbidly obese man have for deciding to lose weight?

If reports are correct, he had a less-intrusive procedure than the one I had in 2006. For those of you scoring at home, he seems to have weighed about the same as I did at my peak though he's reportedly 5'11" and I'm 6'3". He's always said that his cholesterol and other vital signs were "surprisingly good" for a man of his heft and that was true of me, as well. One of the reasons I believe the surgery went so smoothly for me was that, girth aside, I was in pretty good shape. My wise, all-knowing physician suggested the procedure to me and said, "If you do it when you're this fit, it'll be a breeze. If you wait ten years until you're doing it to save your life, there will be complications."

He did not recommend this surgery (or even the kind Christie had) to all or even most of his overweight patients and I do not recommend anything more to people than that they look into it. My doctor just thought it was a good fit for me and he also could place me with an excellent surgeon. He said, "I might talk you out of it if this guy wasn't available. There are a lot of people performing this procedure who shouldn't." At the time, the surgeon had a two-year wait list but he owed my doctor a favor and I was able to "cut in line," so to speak. Remind me one of these days to tell you the story of how a joke I cracked in front of the surgeon made him decide to move me up.

My weight has gone up and down and continues to fluctuate for reasons that seem to have little to do with what I ingest. I have two sizes of pants in my closet and the larger is six sizes below the biggest trousers I ever wore. Shirts are more confusing because in the world of Big and Tall, no one knows what a shirt size is if it has an "X" in it. I have 3X shirts that are snug on me and 2X shirts that are too big…and don't get me started on "2X Tall" versus "3X Tall" because to some manufacturers, the "Tall" part just means longer shirt tails and to some it means sleeves that presume the garment will be worn by an orangutan. I try to buy shirts now by actual numerical sleeve lengths and collar sizes.

If Governor Christie's lap band does lead to a presidential run, I don't know how I feel about that. I thought his willingness to embrace and praise President Obama during recent hurricane damage showed a political courage we don't see often these days. Some Republicans still regard it as the action of a traitor and I'm a little puzzled as to what they expected him to do. Presumably, Christie did believe Obama was of enormous help to the state and did deliver on all promises. Do Christie's detractors think he should have lied and said otherwise? I guess they think he was too effusive, which is another way of saying, "too honest."

With gestures like that and the fact that the guy comes across as sincere and funny in interviews — and that he has the angrier kind of conservatives calling him a "RINO" — you might forget Christie ain't all that moderate on some issues. Still, if he ever goes for the Republican nomination, he's going to have to pull a Romney and track way over to the right, over near where John McCain decided he had to be. So his current stances may not have much to do with the Chris Christie who might someday appear on my presidential ballot. I mean, he seems at times to be a Republican I could imagine myself voting for…but so did McCain and Romney before they got near their nominations. It might come down to a question of whether it was possible to elect him without turning the country over to Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan.

Over at the American Conservative, Daniel Larison is posting a series of articles that basically say the U.S. would be foolish to invade Syria. Here's one, here's another one, here's another one and here's another one. If you only have time to read one, read the first one.

Speaking of Stooges, as we do often here: The fellow at the right in the photo above is comic Ted Healy. Initially, the Three Stooges were Healy's Stooges but they broke off from him and went off on their own. Healy appeared in movies with and then without them up until his untimely death in 1937 at the age of 41.

How he died is one of those Hollywood mysteries. There are three or four different versions around, at least one or two involving murder. One of the times I visited Larry Fine out at the Motion Picture Country Home, I asked him how Healy had died. He said, "I don't know but I was glad he did." From that, one might infer that the Stooges did not get along well with Mr. Healy, might not one? In any case, you can find various theories strewn across that repository of gossip and urban myths, Wikipedia.

Reporter Larry Harnisch is particularly facile at finding gems of info in old newspapers, especially old Los Angeles newspapers. The papers probably aren't 100% accurate either but they're a lot more accurate (usually) than Wikipedia and they are reporting data that was available at the time of whatever event they're covering. Harnisch has been doing a newspaper inquiry into the death of Ted Healy, if only to debunk some of the more inconsistent accounts. Here's the first entry and if you click ahead, you'll find later ones.

You'll also find other interesting stuff on this website. Here's a link to a 1913 newspaper article about a proposed law to prevent Japanese folks from purchasing property in California. There are folks out there today who'd like to revive this idea but apply it to Muslims.

Media critic Howard Kurtz, who usually criticizes other journalists for their errors, has made a few of his own lately including a whopper about Jason Collins.

On his program, Reliable Sources on Sunday, he gave a pretty thorough apology for the Jason Collins one and then answered questions from two other press critics about that one and some others. You can read about it and watch the segment here. I thought the questioning was brutal, perhaps more so than the offenses warranted, and that Kurtz's answers were about as good as anyone could have done in that situation. I wasn't a big fan of the guy before, ironically because I don't think he's sufficiently harsh on others but I was impressed with him here. I wish there was some way that everyone who reports on what's happening in the world could be grilled like this from time to time.

Stooges Sunday returns with Three Sappy People, which was released December 1, 1939. This one was written by Clyde Bruckman, an important behind-the-scene figure in early film comedy. Bruckman managed to work with many of the major comedians included Buster Keaton, Laurel & Hardy and W.C. Fields, occasionally directing but more often supplying storylines and gags for their films. Alcohol reportedly was the reason his career went into decline in the thirties. He became so undependable that no one would hire him to direct but Columbia, which was building its short subject department even as other studios were dismantling theirs, was glad to have him.

Around the time this Stooges short was made, Buster Keaton — who'd all but destroyed his own career via drinking — needed work and Bruckman arranged for his old collaborator and friend to make shorts for Columbia. Bruckman worked on some of those, too. But in the forties, Bruckman's gag-writing skills began to fail him and he took to stealing gags from old films — some he'd written and some he hadn't. He had an unfortunate tendency to steal from Harold Lloyd, who liked to sue when that happened…and did. Lloyd won one suit and for a time, no studio in town would hire Bruckman. After a while, some producers gave him another chance and again, he stole from Harold Lloyd and Lloyd sued. Soon after, Bruckman borrowed a pistol from Keaton and took his own life…a sad end for a man who'd made so many people laugh.

There's some funny stuff in this Stooges endeavor so try and forget the depressing story I just told you and enjoy it…

A couple of folks have written to ask me about this piece by Howard Chaykin about Carmine Infantino. It has some good observations about Carmine as an artist but that's not what they're asking me about. They're asking me about Howard writing about Infantino, Gil Kane, Alex Toth and Joe Kubert and then saying…

As noted above, all these men had known each other since their early adolescence — and, for the most part, they regarded each other with distaste, frequently bordering on genuine loathing. Perhaps it was the postwar contraction of the comic book industry, creating more competition for work, that was responsible for this mutual hatred, but I tend to believe it was a simple case of familiarity breeding contempt. There was no greater animosity in that generation than the one that existed between Gil and Carmine. They hated each other with an operatic passion from the day they met — and, since I was regarded as Gil's protégé, I was never one of Carmine's boys.

"Is that true?" my correspondents ask. Well, yes…though I don't think Kubert, who in that group of four was easily the most secure of himself as an artist, ever had anywhere near the same animosities…and I suspect whatever hostility Infantino had towards Chaykin was more a resentment of youth and talent. Some — a clear minority but some — of those in comics' first generation had an underlying bitterness towards an incoming talent pool that seemed to be shoving them aside by its sheer presence. And of course, older men often have a primal jealousy towards younger men, especially younger men who seem to have more opportunities to make money, more opportunities to get laid, more opportunities to not die in the next twenty years, etc.

A lot of the anger folks like this felt towards each other struck me as a redirection of the anger they felt not about their work but at the seeming disconnect between doing successful work and being rewarded for successful work. Whenever I was around Gil or Alex and they got on the subject of Carmine, that's clearly what it was.

Carmine Infantino was a very good artist…one of the best. His work sold well, the editors at DC were glad to have him doing as much as he could and he made a decent living…but that's all it was: A decent living. Most people on this planet want more than that. If nothing else, they'd like to have enough money in the bank so that if they slow down or get sick or just can't keep up the pace, they won't be out in the street.

To make that decent living back then, a comic book artist had to keep cranking out a certain number of pages per week. Jack Kirby, in the sixties, was outputting 15-25 — an incredible pace even if he'd been doing average pages where he just drew what he was told. As it happens, they were magnificently drawn pages that he plotted or co-plotted and which introduced and developed properties that would be worth billions of dollars…for someone else. You'd think a guy who could do that would be set for life but no. All the time he did them, he was fretting over what would happen to him and his family if his health failed or the company went under or they fired him. One of his eyes was giving him trouble — a big scare when everything in your world depends on your ability to draw and to draw rapidly. All of these guys had lived through the Great Depression. All of them had lived through periods of rampant unemployment in the comic book industry…and fears that comics would soon go the way of the pulp magazines that had once been a similar, flourishing market.

For someone like Infantino when an artist was all he was, it was not a question of, "Gee, maybe if I do my job better, I can get rich." Oh, if only it had been that. All the comic artists I'm mentioning here were men who did their job about as well as anyone could. Doing it better, if that was even possible, would not lead to better paychecks or more security. Harvey Kurtzman, speaking once about his superlative work creating MAD said, "I know what I did had a value far beyond what I was paid at the time. What I don't know is how to get my reward." It's a problem they all faced. Jack Kirby used to say that the guys who didn't do great, profitable work in comics were probably happier in their jobs than those that did. It wasn't that difficult for even a mediocre artist in comics to get the meager top pay. It was impossible for the best guys to get much more than that…or the kind of financial security you get when you're among the best guys in almost any other field.

They all dealt with this disconnect in different ways. Some, like Kirby, just worked harder, hoping somehow there'd be so much profit from one of his brainstorms that some of it would have to fall his way. Jack, by the way, had no animosity towards anyone I'm mentioning here; only respect and empathy.

Some, like Toth and Kane, got mad. In fact, Toth lived in a state of near-perpetual fury at the comic book industry and also his other area of intermittent employment, TV animation. In this other article, Chaykin makes some excellent points about Toth's anger and how difficult he was to work with. If anything, it could be worse than Howard makes it out to be. It wasn't just that Alex could be unpleasant; it's that before he'd completed an assignment, he might well have some sort of anxiety attack about it and find some excuse to quit as matter of alleged principle and not hand in anything. I did a couple of projects with him before coming to the same conclusion as Chaykin; that "…avoiding contact with Alex Toth was a positive and healthy lifestyle choice."

And in his own attempt to escape that disconnect, Infantino had to give up doing what he did best, which was to draw Flash and Adam Strange pages. He had to get himself promoted into management.

Obviously there were other perks besides the salary to being The Boss. There were also downsides. Infantino stepped up from a job he did well into one he did not do well, at least in the estimation of the corporate bosses who sacked him before long. No other management positions came along and eventually he had to return to what he thought he'd left behind: Cranking out pages as long as his health would endure. The disconnect between the quality (or marketability) of a comic creator's work and his or her income lessened in the eighties. It became possible to get rich by writing or drawing a top-selling comic but by the time he returned to DC, he was not capable of doing a top-selling, royalty-earning comic. Howard Chaykin could produce one but Carmine Infantino couldn't.

Before Carmine became DC management, the hostilities Chaykin mentioned in his article had been simpler: Several men of throbbing egos crammed into a leaky lifeboat. Of course, they'd fight but at least the enmity was tempered by the awareness that they were all in it together. Once Infantino was out of the boat — once he seemed to be in a position to fix the disconnect but claimed he couldn't — that's when you got your real antipathy. Plus, there were simple, old-fashioned business disputes. Both Kane and Toth felt they'd been wronged by the company under Carmine…and their rage towards him and each other was nothing compared to the animus 'twixt Infantino and another artist once viewed as a peer and an equal, Mike Sekowsky. I got along with all these men except, after his exile, Infantino. I also learned not to mention Gil in front of Alex, Joe in front of Mike, et cetera, and Carmine in front of any of them.

It was jarring to me. I respected and loved the work of all of them. I also liked them all on a personal but individual basis. But when I saw what the comic book industry was doing to them, I think I liked it a little less. Those men all deserved better.

Back in this message, I wrote about my mother's cooking and gave you one or two of her best recipes. I mentioned in there that she made a wonderful Meat and Rice dish. She didn't make it often because it took a long time to prepare…and if she was going to devote that much time to dinner, we all preferred that she spend it making one of her Lamb Hot Pots.

Recently, I tried a heat-and-serve entree I found in a local market's meat section. It's Hormel's Beef Roast au jus, which heats in the microwave in four minutes, then you have to let it sit for one additional minute before serving. During that minute, I can microwave one of the ready-to-serve Minute Rice cups. I empty the rice cup into a bowl, put about half the roast beef and juice on it and — voila! — I have a reasonable approximation of my mother's Meat and Rice dish. No, it's not every bit as good but if she was still around and cooking, and she felt like spending the hour-and-a-half to whip up the Meat and Rice, I think I would have told her to save 85 minutes and just do the pre-fab microwave version.

I'm tempted to romanticize my mother's cooking and say that her loving touch created a culinary delight that no corporate microwave creation could possibly equal…but the truth is that this comes close. On the other hand, no one — and I've tried them in all the great delicatessens of L.A. and New York — can come close to her potato latkes.

Austin Pendleton is one of the very few surviving stars of the movie, Skidoo, and maybe the only one who will admit to being in it. Here are his recollections of being part of one of the oddest films ever made. Thanks, Gordon Flagg.

I am of the opinion that all psychics are frauds. Some of them seem to believe their own bull but that doesn't mean it's not bull. It just means they believe it.

Over the years, I've encountered a range of believers. I had (very briefly…for about three weeks) a girl friend who not only believed in psychics but she believed in all psychics. Anyone who called themselves that could sense the future, chat with dead relatives, etc. If they had a home in a bad neighborhood with a neon sign out front that said PSYCHIC and gave a phone number, they were surely infallible. I don't believe every person out there who calls themselves a plumber can actually fix my toilet but she believed in every self-proclaimed psychic. I used to ask her, "If they're so good, why do they have to give you their phone number? Shouldn't they just know when you're coming by for a reading?"

I've also encountered people who say, "I don't believe in psychics," and then there's a pause and they cautiously add, "Although my Aunt Helen sometimes knew things she couldn't have known about…" I can't debunk the Aunt Helens from afar but I do think there's always an explanation — usually either coincidence or a case of the onlooker wanting so badly to believe that they mentally rearrange the evidence.

Anyway, here's a news report on how one family of alleged psychics is pleading guilty to cheating their clients out of some $25 million. Wish we saw more of this.

Just came across this clip of Mal Z. Lawrence doing a hunk of his Catskills-style stand-up act. Lawrence is a graduate of the late days of the great Jewish resorts in that area and now tours the country re-creating that environment. If you aren't familiar with him, you should be — because he's darned funny…

I don't think any of the 16 Amazing Mandy Patinkin Quotes That Will Change Your Life will actually change your life. But one or two of them might make you think about interesting things.