Monthly Archives: October 2013

A commencement address delivered by Dr. William H. Cosby…

I've been busy with physical therapy on my knee today. It's getting better at about the speed tortoises twerk…but it is getting better. I've also been finishing a script for a new comic book I've signed on to write. I think its publisher is announcing it this weekend at the New York Comic Con, which I am not attending. Once it's officially announced, I'll tell you about it here.

I don't like to embed Comedy Central videos on this site as they tend to do glitchy things. Matter of fact, I'd say half the websites out there that offer videos they hope other sites will embed have them configured poorly. Either they autostart, which is just plain annoying, or they don't offer customization options like sizing so you can make them fit into the design of your site, or they're just plain full of extra script and code that clutters and crashes. You'd think since YouTube makes it so easy — and enjoys so much success in this area — that all other web designers would just ape them. Yeah, you'd think so.

Anyway, I suggest that if you didn't see Jon Stewart's piece on Obamacare last night, you take a few minutes and watch it. Here's a link to it on the Daily Show website and it'll probably play there as two parts with a brief commercial between 'em.

I have friends who have literally, actually, for-real died because they didn't have health insurance. I have others who are still with us but may not be for long if they don't get some. I do not see any other real plan even vaguely on the horizon to help those people other than the ones the Obama Administration is now attempting to institute…and I suspect the reason you don't see another viable plan is this: Any plan anyone comes up with to solve this problem is going to have all the same things "wrong" with it that Obama's political enemies are now citing to attack his plan. Except maybe that it won't constitute a triumph for this president.

In other news: In case you missed it, plans to expand the convention center in San Diego — in large part to keep Comic-Con there — have been approved unanimously by the California Coastal Commission. There are still obstacles but they've hurdled one of the biggies. I stand by my prediction that Comic-Con will not be decamping for any other city for a long time…if ever.

As some of you know, I am the Supervising Producer of The Garfield Show, an animated series which is produced for worldwide consumption and which runs in the U.S. on Cartoon Network and/or Boomerang. Starting next week, it's running on both but as far as I can tell, it's just reruns of the 78 half-hours we produced for Seasons One through Three.  Neither network is running Season Four yet, even though those episodes are long-completed and have aired across most of the rest of this planet.

Season Four was a bit different from the first three seasons of the show. In those, each half hour consisted of two 11-minute episodes. In Season Three, a few of those featured serialized stories that ran four episodes…or two half-hours. In Season Four, we did seven five-parters that are quite spectacular with songs and scope and some of the best CGI animation I've ever seen done for television. I'm quite proud of how they came out and I'll try and let you know when they — and the other, normal-length episodes that comprise Season Four — finally air in on this continent. Of course, that means someone will have to tell me…and why should anyone do that?

Back to work. I have another one of those Tales of My Childhood coming up in a day or three here…

To those in the Southern California area: On October 27, which is a Sunday, the Cinerama Dome theater in Hollywood is having a 50th anniversary screening of the movie that opened that fine establishment. Yes, it's been fifty (50!) years since It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World debuted in that theater and debuted that theater. It's a 5 PM showing and tickets are now on sale here. Betcha they won't last long.

I don't know yet if there will be any special festivities or programs at the event. Since Jonathan Winters passed and Sid Caesar became incapable of public appearances, the roster of surviving stars looks pretty anemic but maybe there'll be something. There should be. Anyway, I hear they're not running a 70mm print but a digital version, instead. I don't care. I'm going. I've seen this movie a jillion times and I'm gonna keep on watching it until I figure out just why the Chinese hate chop suey.

Here's a little video with two very funny men…Chuck McCann and his frequent partner, the late Pat McCormick. This is something they did for Dick Clark's Bloopers and Practical Jokes TV show but it didn't make it to air…

Disney has changed a long-standing policy at its theme parks. They no longer allow special privileged access to a party of guests that contains one or more disabled folks. The reason given — and it makes sense that they'd want to stop this — is that a little cottage industry has sprung up. Disabled folks are hiring themselves out — sometimes as guides, sometimes just joining your party for a fee — to enable you and your friends and/or family to bypass the long lines, use the special entrances, etc.

I wonder if anyone considered just limiting the frequency with which a disabled person could qualify for one of those Special Assistance Passes. In any event, them's the new rules…

Disney Parks is modifying the current Guest Assistance Card program, which provides access to attractions for guests with disabilities, so it can continue to serve the guests who truly need it. The new program is designed to provide the special experience guests have come to expect from Disney. It will also help control abuse that was, unfortunately, widespread and growing at an alarming rate.

The new Disability Access Service (DAS) Card will replace the Guest Assistance Card on Oct. 9. Guests at Walt Disney World Resort and Disneyland Resort can request a Disability Access Service Card at Guest Relations. DAS Cardholders will receive a return time for attractions based on the current wait time.

Disney Parks has long recognized and accommodated guests with varying needs. Guests can visit Guest Relations to discuss their individual situation, and Disney Parks will continue to provide assistance that is responsive to their unique circumstances.

I can understand why folks would want to abuse the system. The last two times I went to Disneyland, I was fully able-bodied yet I was able to cut lines, go in the special entrances, by-pass the mobs, etc. In '97, my friend Wendy Pini asked me to take her there for a day and as she'd just had a hip replacement, she qualified for a Special Assistance Pass. We waited in no lines except, sometimes, behind others with the same privileges. We got into everything we wanted to get into…including one or two rides I didn't want to go on but Wendy insisted. My stomach only finally settled down last Tuesday from the Indiana Jones experience.

A few years later, the Disney Channel was toying with the idea of doing a live (live!) variety show on Saturday nights from Disneyland and I was asked about maybe producing it. I immediately said — and I was right — that it was a terrible, utterly impossible idea.  The person I was meeting with then said, "Well, before we decide that, let's go down to Disneyland some Saturday and take a look." I decided to go along with that, especially after she told me she had some sort of Disney Executive Pass that sounded even more magical than what Wendy had. In fact, she knew I was right that day in her office and we made the trip just so she could take a free trip to Disneyland and use the pass.  She said we could even have dinner in Club 33, which was something Wendy and I couldn't have done, not being members or having access.

Our expedition more or less replicated the access I'd had with Wendy except that we had a private tour guide and we got into everything we wanted to get into except Club 33, which was seriously overbooked.  A voice over the intercom that admits you basically told us that if Walt himself came back from the dead and wanted a table that night, they'd have to turn him away.  But that one glitch aside, I had a great time on both occasions and I suspect the reason I haven't been back to the Magic Kingdom since is that those two trips spoiled me.

Anyway, I agree that's a great way to experience the Happiest Place on Earth and make yourself even happier. And I agree that it's unfair to others the way things have evolved. Next time I go, I'll wait in the lines just like everyone else. Or I'll get some Disney exec to take me so I don't have to.

Actor Jay Robinson died last Friday at the age of 83. Jay was a fascinating man whose personal story was probably as interesting as any movie or TV show in which he appeared.

Jay was a major star on Broadway and was "discovered," as they say, in 1953 and cast in the motion picture, The Robe. It's hard to get noticed in a film that stars Richard Burton, Victor Mature and Jean Simmons…but Jay, in the key role of Caligula, earned some of the film's best notices. It led to many important roles (including a reprise as Caligula in Demetrius and the Gladiators) and he was just becoming a major star when it happened.

"It" was an arrest in December of '59 for possession and sale of heroin. He served jail time but when he got out, he discovered his career was over. Studios wouldn't touch him. He drifted into other work in mostly menial jobs, got into all kinds of trouble and wound up behind bars again. Finally, in 1968 when he got out, he cleaned up his thoughts and mind — and finding Jesus, he said, was the big thing — and made an all-out attempt to rebuild his acting career. While he never attained his pre-arrest stature, he did manage to find steady work, mostly in small roles. Once typed as Caligula, he found himself now typed for over-the-top roles of a fantastic nature. He did a lot of horror and science-fiction films and finally got himself cast in a Saturday morning series, the Krofft SuperShow, in which he played the villainous Dr. Shrinker.

I worked with him on a subsequent Krofft series in which he played a similar, scenery-chewing mad scientist. He was awfully good…a very nice man who worked very hard at his craft.

I have two main memories of Jay, both from that series. Jay wrote his autobiography…a soul-cleansing book he called The Comeback. It was a little preachy but then so was Jay. One day shortly before it came out, he came up to me on the set and asked me if I'd like to have lunch with him and some of his friends that day. He said, "You're interested in Watergate, aren't you?" I told him I was, yes, very much. "I remember you said that," he continued. "Well then, you have to come to lunch with us."

An hour or so later, his friends came on the set — all of them way too well-dressed to be in our crummy studio. The leader of the group was Charles Colson, once hailed as "Nixon's hatchet man," who'd served time for his Watergate-related crimes and then run a religious organization since his release from prison. I don't recall if he was publishing Jay's book but he was involved in its marketing and that's what the lunch was about.

Before long, I was sitting among his entourage at a big table where not a word was said about Nixon or Watergate but there was constant mention of Jesus, God, Our Heavenly Father, etc. Me aside, everyone alternated: One sentence about how to boost the gross of Jay's book by strong-arming it into religious stores and book clubs, then one non sequitur paying lip service to Jesus. It was like they were all convinced that when you reach those Pearly Gates, you are judged not on anything you've done but wholly on how many times in your life you mentioned God. One of the few things I said to Mr. Colson — and I actually said this — was, "Praise the Lord and pass the ketchup."

He didn't get it. He passed the ketchup, said "Praise God," then turned to Jay and explained how he was going to (nicely) threaten some distributor of religious books and get them to drop a certain other book and push The Comeback. Jay was pretty serious about not caring about the money. He just wanted people to read his story so that they might benefit from his experiences. For everyone else there though, it was just product to be hustled hard for profits.

That was one memory I have of Jay. The other one was a few weeks later, I believe. The show we did together featured the Bay City Rollers, a once-kinda popular rock group that was about fifteen months into its Year at the Top. I believe they'd actually retired but upon being offered this series, had reassembled to make a few more bucks Rollering before they went their separate ways.

The Rollers were great guys but one of them had what seemed like a bit of a drug problem. One day, he was woefully late for a taping and when he came in, he didn't know his lines but he did know an array of excuses no one believed. One of the other band members, in front of everyone, accused him of being too stoned to get up that morning. The tardy Roller shot back that he could handle it. It wasn't going to get in the way of whatever career they had left. Then Jay stepped in and began lecturing the young man about the evils of narcotics.

That Roller's first response was along the lines of "What do you know about it, old man?" Then Jay said, "I knew plenty about drugs before I went to prison for heroin, and what I didn't know, I learned behind bars." Everyone around got instantly silent and he launched into his story — the ruined stardom, the lost years, the hard climb back…all of it. And I'll give this to that Bay City Roller: He listened. I don't know if he took any of it to heart but he listened. The 15-minute version that Jay delivered was a riveting, emotional story that I'm sure would have helped some drug abusers if they heard it.

And that's mainly how I remember him…telling his story of how he'd destroyed his life…hoping that by sharing it, he'd do somebody some good. He was a kind, compassionate man. And just last week, I saw him on a rerun of an old Banacek and I was reminded he was a darn good actor, too.

Many of you have informed me that Entertainment Weekly has a different excerpt from Henry Bushkin's about-to-be-released book on Johnny Carson. This one is about how, according to Mr. Bushkin, Carson dealt with the belief that his wife Joanne (aka Wife #2) was cheating on him with football's own Frank Gifford. Here's the link.

It should be noted that Kathie Lee Gifford, Frank's third wife, has quoted her husband as saying (at first) that he didn't remember if he had an affair with Joanne and then saying he was sure he hadn't. An odd denial to be sure.

The former Joanne Carson has denied it and is now in a public squabble with her own former assistant who says there was such an affair and that Joanne tried to get her to cover it up. As they're quoted as calling each other liars, yet another Bushkin sample is making the rounds. It claims "The Mob" once ordered a hit on Johnny because he'd been flirtatious with the lady friend of a well-connected boss.

And that's about as much of this stuff as I'm following since my interest in Mr. Carson does not extend to who he slept with. However, I will say this: It's fascinating to me that this is all coming out now.

Johnny's — shall we say? — "approaches" to women were never much of a secret in show business. They were not all that secret but no one ever dared mention them in a public forum before. There are certain performers who somehow earn a bubble of respectability that no one dares pierce. It's fine to write about Frank Sinatra's affairs or connections with shady figures. No one ever wrote about Johnny's before — or at least, never did so in a venue that anyone noticed.

After Carson died — and after Bob Hope and a few others passed on, too — I expected someone would cash in with tell-all books about affairs and dirty dealings. But there's no such book about Hope or the others and it's taken this long for anyone to write anything about Johnny that went against his public image. I really don't know why that is. I don't think it's because there's no market for it.

Ezra Klein on Obama's dilemma in the current shutdown/debt ceiling duel. The more it looks like he's winning, the more he unites Republicans in trying to not give him a win. This sure looks like the biggest obstacle to settling this whole mess.

Yesterday, we had Groucho Marx in a TV version of his play, Time for Elizabeth. Talking with a few fellow Marx Brothers enthusiasts last night, I got to wondering: Did Groucho do that, at least in part, with an eye towards maybe angling into a situation comedy?

By 1964 when Time for Elizabeth aired, You Bet Your Life had run its course and Groucho has followed it with a short-lived series called Tell it to Groucho which, I'm sure, its makers hoped would replicate the success of the previous show. It didn't…so it was unlikely Mr. Marx would be seen in that format again. At about the same time that the latter went off, Jack Paar was announcing his abdication from The Tonight Show and Groucho reportedly let it be known that he might be interested in the position. When Johnny Carson got the nod, there was a six-month interval between Paar's leaving and Johnny's arrival, filled by guest hosts. Groucho was one and in letters to friends, he said he wished he'd gotten the job. (One of the nights he hosted, his guest was a young actress, then shining on Broadway, named Barbra Streisand. Some of the audio still exists of that episode.)

Anyway, he wanted to work. At the time, the most likely way a former star of movie comedy got work in television was to star in a situation comedy. So did anyone propose this for Groucho? He was still a pretty big star, appearing in specials and making guest appearances, so it's hard to believe no one raised the possibility. But if they did, there's no known evidence of it.

There is, however, evidence that Chico Marx tried to get his own situation comedy. In fact, we have here an imperfect but watchable copy of that unsold pilot. It was called Papa Romani and it was produced in 1949 and aired, like they used to do with unsold pilots, as part of an anthology series — in this case, on 1/9/50. It's not all that funny despite the presence of Chico and, among other actors, Margaret Hamilton and William Frawley. In '51, of course, Mr. Frawley would get into a rather successful situation comedy called I Love Lucy. Here's Chico's unsuccessful attempt…

Robert Holmen read that excerpt of the Henry Bushkin book I linked to and he notes two errors that I'm embarrassed I didn't catch…

• Bushkin mentions Jack Benny among the guests at a 1979 Friars Club dinner for Johnny Carson. Not likely since Benny died in 1974.
• Then he writes of a meeting in April of 1980 between Carson and ABC executives at the home of Joan Rivers, and he quotes Rivers as saying, "No one else is in the place, so feel free to talk about your secrets — how much Barbara Walters makes, how much you have to pay plastic surgeons to keep Joan Collins' boobs off the floor." Joan Collins was not an ABC star then; not until she joined the cast of Dynasty the following year.

So…is the whole book like this? Hope not.

A little profile of our pal Floyd Norman, correctly noted as the first black animator to ever work for Disney. I met Floyd at Hanna-Barbera where he was a valuable talent…and the undisputed master at drawing funny cartoons about the office staff and bosses. I wrote about that here.

Henry Bushkin was Johnny Carson's attorney for eighteen years. You may recall Johnny's occasional on-air references to "Bombastic Bushkin," the guy who got him into great business deals like that tanning salon for Albinos. Anyway, Mr. Bushkin has now written a book about his famous client and all the personal and contractual squabbling that engulfed the Tonight Show host. It comes out next week and is currently available for pre-order on Amazon. Here's a link to pre-order.

And here's a little preview. One of the many interesting facets of Mr. Carson's long run as host of The Tonight Show is that he never intended or expected it to be like that. When he first took on the gig, it was like, "I hope this will last a few years and then I can go do a prime-time series like The Red Skelton Show." At that point, that seemed like it would have been a step up. Moreover, Johnny had once had a show like that, it had failed, and he had a nagging drive to go back and do it right.

As his Tonight Show got more popular, it less and less seemed like a stepping stone to anything else. Shows like Skelton's became passé and Carson realized that to leave his late night slot for one would be a big gamble, a lot more work and — as his Tonight Show money improved — not even a more lucrative job. So he stayed where he was on what was pretty much a year-to-year basis, always thinking he'd pack it in soon. Twenty years before he quit, he said there was no way he'd be doing that show in ten more years. But he was.

I'm eager to read Bushkin's account of all the battles and negotiations and decisions. I'll report back when I do.

This runs 47 minutes so you might not want to watch all of it…but you might want to watch a little.

In the 1940's, Groucho Marx and his friend Norman Krasna wrote a play called Time for Elizabeth. Apparently when they started on it, Groucho had in mind to star in it himself. That was when he was worried about having or not having future employment. By the time they finished it, Groucho was starring weekly on radio in You Bet Your Life, which paid a lot better to do one show a week than the play would have earned him to do eight. He also was tethered to Los Angeles where his game show was produced…so he had a good excuse not to star in the play he co-authored.

It was staged without him…with Otto Kruger in the lead. It opened at the Fulton Theater in New York on September 27, 1948, where it lasted for a whopping eight performances, probably due to its tepid reviews. Some suggested Mr. Kruger had committed the unpardonable sin of not being Groucho Marx; that the character's lines would have sounded right for Groucho but were wrong for Otto. Still, there was a movie sale — reported as $500,000, which sounds awfully high to me for a show that closed so rapidly. There was talk of Groucho starring in the movie but no such film was ever made.

He did tour in it a few times during vacations from You Bet Your Life. Reportedly, he took liberties with his own script, broke character often to chat with the audience, and at the end of each performance delivered a long curtain speech that most audiences preferred to the preceding play. But he only did it once on camera — in an abridged version that ran on April 24, 1964 with his then-wife, Eden Hartford, in a small role. It was an episode of the anthology series, Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater, and that's the video we have for you today. It's not wonderful but it is Groucho and he's pretty funny at times…

Folks keep asking me about Dick Van Dyke and his still-newlywedded, much-younger spouse Arlene. Here's a good interview with Arlene Van Dyke. They seem like a pretty happy couple to me.

Democrats say the votes are there in the House to pass a clean bill to reopen the government. John Boehner say they aren't. So why doesn't Boehner, who has the power to do so, just hold a vote and prove it? William Saletan says he's trying to protect his members from having to commit to a position that can be used against them in the next election.