Turner Classic Movies is running Penelope on Monday afternoon. This is a movie that stars Natalie Wood, Peter Falk, Dick Shawn and Jonathan Winters. Though feature billed, Mr. Winters is in this movie for — and I actually ran a stopwatch on this — 91 seconds. And about a third of that was a stunt double.
Before you tune in to watch it or even set your DVR, read this message I posted years ago and then this one.
One Man Show was a variety series in the late sixties that I recall turning up intermittently on various local stations in Los Angeles. I'm not sure if the show was done originally for ABC (I think it was) and if so, where it first aired or how or why or anything. But each week, some star would take a stage somewhere and proceed to do what was usually not a one man show. Here from November of '69 is one that starred the one, the only…Groucho. The laugh track's a bit phony and Groucho isn't all that great at disguising the fact that he's reading cue cards. But hey, it's Groucho and you probably haven't seen it before…
A complete, full-sized working replica of the Batmobile from the Adam West TV show. There's another version for $50,000 less that's exactly the same but it comes with Adam in it.
I said I hoped the Conan O'Brien interview of Mel Brooks would be the first in a series. Well, as Ralf Haring informs me, it's already the eighth in a series. The other seven are on this page along with an awful lotta behind-the-scenes hype on that series. I'll try to get around to watching some of the others soon.
Hey, if you decided to skip the Conan/Mel interview just before this item, try a little of it. I've heard zillions of Mel Brooks interviews and they're usually the same stories over and over. This one's different and it's the old Conan asking the questions. He was a very good interviewer when he wasn't playing to the audience and trying to top his guests…and it turns out he still is.
Years ago, I did a job for two weeks, punching up the comedy in a screenplay. It was a bunch of us writers all sitting around in an office at 20th Century Fox, trying to add humor to a script that was deemed to be in need of more. Ultimately, the studio threw out our rewrite and had someone else write an entirely new script which they also decided wasn't good enough to film. The project went into turnaround, wound up getting made at another studio and…well, I just looked it up and Leonard Maltin gave it his coveted "BOMB" rating. I saw it and he was being kind.
Anyway, our office at Fox was down the hall from Mel's and he was then doing dozens of press interviews to promote High Anxiety. He liked an audience so some woman — his secretary, I guess — would scurry from office to office saying, "Mel's giving an interview. Come listen." For some reason, our producer — the man who had a lot of his career riding on the screenplay we were trying to improve — would say, "Hey, let's go listen to Mel." So we went and listened to Mel. Three times, I believe, we went and sat on his couch or floor as he held court before some reporter who couldn't believe he was interviewing Mel Brooks. Mel liked having me there because when he momentarily stalled on some proper name and couldn't remember it, I usually could.
Like I said, we did this three times and for the most part, we heard the same interview three times. It was the same questions evoking the same anecdotes. The third time, the interviewer requested the story about Sid Caesar trying to pull the cab driver through the tiny car window port. Mel said, "I don't want to tell that story. I'm sick of telling that story." Then he turned to me and said, "You tell it."
So it's real nice to hear this interview conducted by Mr. O'Brien. I hope this is the first in a series.
Mel Brooks is interviewed for 80 minutes by Conan O'Brien. How could this not be fun?
For some inexplicable reason, the Mark Twain Award actually went this time to someone who's been in the business for a little while. I guess all the new kids on SNL were too busy to accept.
Fly Untitled. My favorite so far…
Matthew Yglesias has a question to make you feel old.
The Al Smith Dinner is this annual affair where politicians and pundits don tuxedoes, sup together, then some of them get up and try to prove how funny they can be. There was one a few nights ago and you might enjoy the keynote speech by Dr. Stephen T. Colbert…
Hey, how were animated cartoons made in the thirties? This is an episode of a travelogue-type series done back then narrated by the great broadcaster, Lowell Thomas. He takes us to the Walter Lantz cartoon studio where, for some reason, Mr. Lantz is doing about four different jobs that he probably did not all do when no newsreel was being made. The cartoon in progress is one that starred Oswald the Lucky Rabbit called Soft Ball, which came out in 1936.
Many animation scholars believe Mr. Lantz just made a couple of scenes for the documentary, then went back later and built an entire cartoon around them. That was so he wouldn't be wasting that material. Some of the process depicted seems to have been altered to look more interesting on camera. For instance, I doubt the voice actors did their work simultaneous with the laying-in of sound effects, and sound effects were actually done by a smaller team. Nevertheless, most of this is accurate. (I believe, by the way, the vocal actress you'll see is Berneice Hansen, who was also heard in a number of Warner Brothers and Disney cartoons. Wish someone could identify all the other people in this…)
As readers of this blog know, I'm a big supporter of the Affordable Care Act, AKA "Obamacare." As readers of the web know, there are a lot of folks out there proclaiming it a disaster, a failure, a flop, etc. So far, however, I haven't seen this said by anyone I thought was capable of admitting it was a success if that was how things went. It's all people who predicted — and in many cases, prayed — it would fail. Those who so prayed are pretty awful people in my view. Since no one has offered up a credible, workable Plan B, hoping Obamacare flops is to me like saying, "Oh, I hope all those people who can't get health insurance because they're poor and/or have pre-existing conditions don't get it!"
We have two serious, related problems in this country. One is that there are all these men, women and children who can't get affordable health care. If that many people had their lives threatened by terrorists, we'd start drone strikes and marching off to war and surrendering more civil liberties. I don't understand not wanting to do something for those people. Also too, the rising cost of health care for all is crippling our nation's economy. I don't understand not wanting to fix that…and again, there is no real "other plan." When you hear someone say the answer is tort reform or setting up exchanges, that's someone who has about 4% of a plan. (They've instituted tort reform in several states and it lowers the cost of a policy an average of 1%.)
You want to get rid of Obamacare? Come up with a real alternative plan…something real-er than "we'll appoint committees to study the problems and make recommendations."
But the main reason I'm unimpressed by these articles about Obamacare being a failure is that the ones I read all seem to be about the website crashing…about people waiting online for hours and not being able to sign up. If that's true, as it seems to be, that's not an argument against Obamacare at all. I don't recall one single person who predicted it would fail saying, "It can never work because the website will be slow." They were all talking about the actual manipulation of money — what people would pay, how doctors would be compensated, how insurance rates would or would not fall. We haven't even gotten close to the part of this rollout that tells us how that will go.
Bad website design is not proof that Obamacare can't work. Websites are fixable. Each year, I get dozens of e-mails from folks who've tried to sign up for memberships and/or hotel rooms for Comic-Con in San Diego. It's getting better but it used to be that the site would crash, people would wait online forever and then get dumped off, people wouldn't get what they wanted…
That was, at best, an argument that the organizers had underestimated demand and/or had the wrong people design the sign-up portions of their website. It was not an argument that Comic-Con had failed and had to be repealed.
That's a photo of me with Lou Scheimer, who ran Filmation Studios, producers of hundreds if not thousands of hours of Saturday morning-style TV cartoons. Lou passed away Thursday just a few days shy of what would have been his 85th birthday. He'd been ill for some time with Parkinson's Disease and he'd been declining public appearances. So this was not unexpected.
Filmation Studios is a controversial topic in some circles of the animation community. Here are some positive things you hear: They produced a lot of shows that a lot of people remember fondly, including the first Superman and Batman cartoons made for television, the Star Trek cartoons, Masters of the Universe, many different programs featuring the Archie characters and the show I thought was the best thing they ever did, Fat Albert. They gave an awful lot of work to an awful lot of artists and writers. In some cases, they gave new people an important break. In others, they gave old-timers a place to earn a paycheck after other studios had closed. Lou was very proud of all those breaks and paychecks.
Virtually alone among producers of animation for TV in their time, they fought to keep work in Los Angeles rather than farm it out to overseas houses. One time when the Animation Union struck over this problem, Lou — as a member — was put in the awkward position of picketing his own studio. No one would have faulted him if he'd not done this but instead, he went out, picked up a sign and marched around his own building, demanding that management (i.e., him) cease this pernicious practice that it was not committing. Lou had a good sense of humor and a friend of mine who worked long and hard at Filmation said, "To the extent it didn't get in the way of making a profit, it was a fun place."
The negatives? Well, they produced TV cartoons with all the restrictions and problems that TV cartoons had in those days. There were times when their shows were better than others who had to operate under all these handicaps and times when they weren't. Still, if you cringe at most animation of the seventies and eighties, Filmation offered you much to cringe about. Someone once said of Lou, "He knows how to take the impossible deal and make money off it." Some of his shows were produced on budgets that would have caused any other studio to say, "It can't be done for that" and pass. Depending on your point-of-view, it might be a negative that he didn't do that.
This article will tell you more about the history of Lou Scheimer and Filmation, though it repeats the oft-made claim that the studio never sent animation work out of this country. They did but only rarely and when desperate. And this obit in the L.A. Times will tell you more. So I think for the rest of this piece, I'll just tell you about my own path-crossing with Lou Scheimer.
Every time I saw him in the last twenty or so years, he'd throw an arm around me, hug me and tell everyone within earshot that I was one of the many talented writers who'd started with Filmation, done wonderful work for him and then gone on to bigger and better things. "I'm so proud of Mark and guys like him," he'd say. He was so happy and complimentary that I never had the heart to tell him the total amount of work I'd done for his studio. It was one script…and he hated it. I was offered work there on many occasions but, to put it simply, I always had better offers, both in terms of money and in the chance of doing my best work. Once though, I was trapped.
Filmation had a series that they were trying to sell to CBS. CBS was reticent to buy it. Filmation was getting desperate. They were counting on selling that series so they would not have to lay off one entire division. Lou went to CBS and said, in essence, "Tell me what I have to do to get you to buy this show." At the time, I was doing a lot of development work for CBS, which meant I'd write a bible (outline of the format, description of the characters and how they operated, sample plot ideas) and a pilot script for a potential series. I'm not sure who it was at CBS but someone there suggested I might be the guy who could whip it into a shape that the network could purchase.
I was sitting at home one day here when my phone rang. The voice on the other end of the line identified itself as Lou Scheimer…and it sounded like Lou Scheimer. I'd once interviewed Lou for a magazine called The Monster Times and I'd heard him speak at animation-related gatherings. Yes, it sounded like Lou Scheimer but it also sounded like my friend Frank Welker's impression of Lou Scheimer. Frank is arguably the best mimic alive and inarguably the most in-demand cartoon voice guy, and a few weeks earlier, he'd done a medley for me of his impressions of people who'd hired him, Joe Barbera and Lou Scheimer among them. The Lou Scheimer on my phone sounded less like the real Lou Scheimer than he did like Welker's impression of Lou Scheimer.
Certain it was Frank, I decided to play along. I said, "Hi, Lou! What can I do for you?" Before I realized it wasn't Frank, I was half-committed to write this pilot for the real Lou Scheimer. Later in the day, a fellow at CBS called and asked me, as a favor to the Children's Programming Department at his network, to do this development for Filmation even though the money was a bit on the thin side. So, blaming Welker and not myself of course, I committed the rest of the way. Filmation sent over what they'd done so far on the idea and I instantly saw the problem.
The show was overpopulated. As developed so far, it had about 30 regular characters, 25 of which didn't contribute much, if anything. The concept was lost in the crowd, so to speak. Lou had left the U.S. on a business trip and I'd been told to deal with his second-in-command, a lovely gent named Arthur Nadel. I told Arthur what I wanted to do and he said, "Okay, we trust you." Emboldened by that trust, I rewrote the bible so the show had but five regular characters. When I wrote up suggested plot outlines, I used about five more of those extra players as characters who might appear once…but I basically threw out 20-25 characters as superfluous.
CBS liked the bible. I got the go-ahead to write a pilot script. I did. They liked it and they committed to the series. This was all while Lou was still in Europe. A few days later, I got a call: Lou was back in town and would like me to come in and see him.
I went in, figuring there'd be confetti and party hats for my having sold the show and saved the day. Instead, Lou's first words when I stepped into his office were, "Ah, here's the man who killed twenty toy deals for me." I thought he was kidding but he wasn't. To try and sell the show, he had lowered its price down to a level he felt CBS couldn't refuse, a level that would force him to produce the show at a loss. To then get the show above water, he'd made a deal with a toy company to put out action figures of all the characters…but the deal called for all those characters to appear a certain number of times in the first season. The math didn't work if every episode didn't feature a lot of them.
Remember what I wrote earlier about how Lou could take an impossible deal and figure out how to make it work? Well, this show was an impossible deal but in pruning all those characters, I'd gotten in the way of what he was counting on to make that particular deal work.
I told him I was sorry but my assignment had said nothing about toy deals. My job was to get CBS to commit to the series and they had. Lou admitted I was right and I got a grudging "thank you" — but he also told me that he had to get a lot of those characters back into the show. Which is what he did. Once CBS had signed the paperwork and the show was officially on their schedule, he began convincing them the show needed this guy and that gal and this monster. Eventually, it was so unlike what I'd written that my pilot script was never produced. I had nothing to do with any of this. I was contractually entitled to a screen credit every week — "Developed for Television by Mark Evanier" — but I never got it and never made an issue of not getting it. I watched one episode and it had very little to do with what I'd done.
In spite of this, I liked Lou. He and his partners Norm Prescott and Hal Sutherland fought like crazy to build his studio and keep the doors open over the years. They were the little guys in a field where the biggies had the power to step on them but they succeeded, nonetheless. In a sense the whole studio was an impossible deal but Lou and his cronies found a way to make it work.