Monthly Archives: January 2014

I have friends — or maybe acquaintances would be a better term for most of them — who insist to me that scientists are divided on the subject of Global Warming and Climate Change. No, they're not.

This is the opening to The Huckleberry Hound Show as it aired in Brazil. Dom Pixote — that's what he was called down there — was sponsored by Trol, a Brazilian toy company, and they had some local cartoon studio animate (not very well) an opening for the program with many plugs for their brand. But I kinda like the translated theme song sung in Portuguese…

This cold has me serializing my sleep. I sleep. I get up to cough. I sleep. I get up to cough. Usually, I need about five hours a night and I think I may have gotten that in bits 'n' pieces since I first went to bed last night. The rare times I get sick are the only times I can go to bed without the feeling that I've reached a good stopping point in my writing — finishing a script or a key scene or just plain gotten something done, even if I start the next workday by tossing it and rewriting. If I go to bed and I haven't finished something, I generally lie there wide awake, mentally writing what I should have finished before turning in…and I get up, shuffle back to the computer and put it down. There are advantages to working at home.

Lots of nice e-mails this AM from folks who tuned in Stu's Show. One of the things I love about It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is exemplified by the fact that Stu, Mike Schlesinger and I could spend three hours and fifteen minutes talking about it and barely scratch the veneer. There's just so much that's fascinating about that film — all the fine performances, the amazing stunt work, the technical expertise of those who made it, the locations, the special effects, etc. As I said on the show, I fear that in the Commentary Track, we may have dwelled overmuch on the mistakes…like Mickey Rooney wearing a headset in one shot and not in the next. But every movie has those and it's impressive how few there were in a film that was so involved, so complicated.

I think I should also say how impressed I've always been with the Criterion company. I have a lot of their DVDs (and before that, Laserdiscs) and I never bought one that I thought wasn't as diligently-assembled as was humanly possible. They always do the best transfers of the material and have the best special features. Working with them on this one, I witnessed the attention-to-detail I knew was inbred into the company.

They were also classy enough to actually send me advance copies of the finished product. I've probably done interviews or tracks or otherwise helped out on two dozen DVDs — sometimes paid, sometimes not. And I could guess that with less than half of them, the makers of the DVD honored their promises to send me copies of the thing when it came out. It is too often a case of once they get what they want out of you, they forget you. At least twice when someone at Time-Warner Home Video called and asked me to help out on a DVD, I had to say to them, "I won't talk to you about this until you send me copies of the last DVD I helped you folks with." Somehow, it's more annoying when they don't send you the $29.95 DVD than when they forget to send you a check for a lot more money.

Turning to other matters: I put up a video the other day about a blind gent on the street getting a helping hand from a passer-by. This video has been much seen on the 'net and apparently, a number of people find something a little (or a lot) offensive about it. Considering it from their viewpoint, I'm not inclined to disagree. This article was posted on a blog called "Bad Cripple" and I think the person overreacts but does make a valid case. I thought it was a nice bit of filmmaking but if I thought about it this way at the time, I might not have linked to it.

Saving Mr. Banks was the surprise non-nominee in this morning's Oscar nominations. It got one for "Original Score" and I think that was it. Everyone thought Emma Thompson was a shoo-in for Best Actress and maybe Tom Hanks or Paul Giamatti for Best Supporting Actor but everyone who thought that was wrong. I don't think that says anything about Hollywood finding the film dishonest or biased. I don't think the Academy ever speaks with one mindset or voice on things like that. I think folks just found other films and other actors more impressive. Always be wary when you hear someone say something like, "Well, they nominated Bruce Dern because they think he was unfairly overlooked for Black Sunday back in 1977." There is absolutely no data on this, no polls, no spokespersons speaking on behalf of the voters, no evidence at all. I was going to write it's like someone trying to tell you what your cat is thinking but in that case, the person at least would know you have one cat and maybe what color or sex it is. Those who try to say why Academy voters voted a certain way don't even know who those voters were or how many voted that way.

Hmm…I seem to have stopped coughing. The healing powers of blogging. More later.

I'm getting over a cold that I think was brought on by staying up all night a few consecutive nights finishing a script. If you tuned in Stu's Show today, you heard me coughing now and then.

And if you tuned in and stuck with us the entire time, you heard Mike Schlesinger and me discuss It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World for — this is the exact timing — 3 hours, 15 minutes and 24 seconds. When the movie debuted, it was three hours and twenty-one minutes. If you missed it, you can download it from the Stu's Show Archives which you can find at the program's website for a measly 99 cents. While you're there, take advantage of the bargain rate and download four past Stu's Show episodes for the price of three. I'd recommend the ones with Dick Van Dyke, Jonathan Winters and Shelley Berman…among many, many other good ones.

I would write more but I'm too tired. See you tomorrow.

Just watch this…

Meryl Streep made some news at the National Board of Review dinner held last Thursday. She blasted Walt Disney for sexism and support of anti-Semite groups. I'm not quite sure where some of the "facts" come from when people say such things but they rarely seem to come from anyone who actually knew and worked with Walt for any amount of time. The case that he treated women badly seems to hinge on a 1938 letter that said women couldn't be animators. In the context of the time, that was not an unreasonable view and anyway, it was 1938. Disney hired plenty of women in important positions after that.

I've probably over the years heard Walt discussed by two dozen people who spent a lot of time with him. I've heard zero tales of sexism or anti-Semitism. Our friend Floyd Norman, who was the first black animator at the studio, thinks Ms. Streep wasn't talking about the Walt Disney he knew and worked for.

Stu Shostak's show this week celebrates the release (next week) of Criterion's new deluxe DVD/Blu-ray set of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Criterion is the real class act of the home video market, offering the best prints and the best special features. You can order a copy here.

Stanley Kramer's epic comedy was released on November 7, 1963. At that point, it was 201 minutes long — that's counting the film, the overture, the intermission music and some recorded police calls that played during intermission, and the exit music. This was what was called a "Road Show" release. The movie was shown on a reserved seat basis at a few selected theaters in big cities and projected via a new kind of Cinerama. Previously, the wide screen of Cinerama was achieved by splitting the image into thirds and projecting it via three projectors, kept theoretically in sync. It was complicated and often resulted in visible seams in the image.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was the first film released in a new process that achieved Cinerama dimensions with one projector. The screen was big but the movie was long. A few weeks later — while still in its Road Show engagements — it was trimmed to 162 minutes. Later, when the film moved on to regular, non-Cinerama theaters, things like the overture and exit music were jettisoned and the movie ran around 154 minutes. That's the version that has been available on TV and home video for decades.

The new Criterion product contains two versions of the movie — the best-possible transfer of the General Release version and a "restored" version which puts back most but not all of the trims and scenes that were omitted when the film was cut. At 197 minutes, it's almost the same version that opened on 11/7/63 but a few of the restored scenes have video but no audio…or audio but no video. The video in the restored scenes is not quite as good but they are very watchable.

The longer version can be watched with or without the Commentary Track in which three Mad World experts discuss the making of the film, the performers in it, the performers not in it, where the location scenes were shot, etc. The three experts are former Sony Pictures VP Michael Schlesinger, Video Master (and Mad World authority) Paul Scrabo…and me. On Wednesday's Stu's Show, Mike and I will be spending 2-3 hours discussing the film, telling you trivia that didn't get into the Commentary Track, discussing the impact of the movie and so forth. If you're interested in this movie, you won't want to miss it.

There are two ways to listen to Stu's Show. One is to listen live. Go to the Stu's Show website during the show when we do it live and you can listen for free. It starts at 4 PM Pacific Time, which is 7 PM Eastern and other times in other time zones. It will run at least two hours and probably much longer.

After we do it, it will appear in the Stu's Show Archives at the same web address. There, you'll be able to download it for 99 cents — or get four shows for the price of three. There are plenty of great past episodes of Stu's Show there that you'll enjoy. (He's even had on a number of the cast members from Mad World like Jonathan Winters, Carl Reiner, Stan Freberg and Marvin Kaplan.)

So that's my plug — for the Criterion set and for Stu's Show. Buy. Tune in. Enjoy. You may even hear Uncle Herman's odd theory about French Toast.

Clydene Nee could use a hand. Clydene is a charming lady who was a colorist of comic books when I met her but has more recently been the person in charge of coordinating Artists Alley at the Comic-Con International. That is a very demanding position of responsibility and she does it very, very well. If you know her, or even if you've just enjoyed hanging around that part of the con, you might want to donate some bucks to help her with horrendous medical bills. That's what a lot of her friends are doing. Her enemies would help out too but she doesn't have any. Not one.

I sometimes tell people my main objection to Obamacare is that it's not Single Payer. That's glib and not altogether true. But I don't expect the U.S. to embrace Single Payer in my lifetime and pressing for it is largely just a way to get whatever health care system we do have to be more comprehensive and responsive to the uninsured. It's like how some folks are now demanding the minimum wage be doubled, hoping that if that movement seems loud enough, it might result in a compromise to raise it by, say, a third.

But why not Single Payer? Well, it has its problems, above and beyond the fact that this country will never go for it. Ezra Klein discusses some of them.

Here's another whole episode of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson (whole except for some music cues), this one from January 9, 1986. The guests are Liberace, Rosanna Arquette and comedian George Miller. George, who died way too young, does a stand-up spot starting at about 32:40 into the program. It has some rough patches (and one odd bleep) but he finishes strong…

Over in Facebook, Dale Herbest wrote to ask…

Garfield and Friends was one of my favorite Saturday Morning cartoon shows when I was kid and I was always upset that it only ran for six years. I feel it should have gone on another two or three seasons. Officially, what was the reason and/or cause of the show's demise?

I'm probably going to "over-answer" your question here but I've been asked this and similar questions a lot so here's a rough explanation of how it used to work and sorta still does.

When a network buys a series from an outside supplier, they pay a license fee for it. The fee gives them X number of runs for Y number of dollars. Infinite variations are possible on X and Y, which are negotiated and then renegotiated and then re-renegotiated, etc. The contract also usually specifies that the network can order additional seasons. Almost always, and this was the case with Garfield and Friends, a "bump" is built into the deal which says that every time the network picks up another season, Y goes up.

If you're a producer and you sell a series, you have three choices. You can try to produce the show for less than the license fee and then the difference becomes immediate profit. This usually means you won't produce a very good show but that doesn't bother some people.

Or you can try to produce the show for the license fee — in other words, break even on its initial network airings — and then make your profit when you sell those shows into syndication or on DVD or overseas.

Or you can dig into your deep pockets — you need deep pockets to produce a TV series — and do the show for more than the network is paying you. This is called deficit-financing. You take a loss on each episode you produce but this results (usually) in a better show. You do this because you figure a better show will lead to more success, more demand, more overseas sales, a bigger syndication payoff, more merchandising, etc. If the show only runs one season, you're not going to have enough episodes to sell to other countries. You're not going to have much of a syndication package for stations to purchase. The folks now selling the syndication package of Seinfeld are making millions per year of pure profit. They wouldn't if it had only lasted a season or two.

And of course, if you have a long-running hit, you have the clout to negotiate a higher license fee from the network. So most shows deficit-finance to some extent.

The initial order for Garfield and Friends was for two seasons and a pretty high license fee. Networks rarely commit for two seasons but The Cat was a highly-desired property and the two main guys behind the show — Lee Mendelson and Jim Davis — had the clout to get what they wanted and, equally important, the willingness to say no if they didn't get what they wanted. So they got a deal for 26 half-hours. Thirteen would air the first year and thirteen would air the second. As soon as it hit the air though, it was apparent that it was a huge hit and CBS asked, almost immediately, if the show could become an hour for the following year. So we just kept making more and more and by the time we'd reached the end of what turned out to be our last season, we'd made 121 half-hours. So you kind of got nine and a half seasons of shows in six years.

CBS never had the rights to air all 121 shows in rotation. As per the terms of the contract, every time they ordered a new season, they got the rights to air the new shows and they got the rights to retain a certain number of older episodes in what is called "the library," meaning a selection of older episodes which can be reaired along with the new episodes and reruns of the new episodes. The network folks would pick what they thought were the strongest past episodes to retain for their library and we were then free to sell the other episodes elsewhere.

Once 73 half-hours had fallen out of the CBS library, our producers felt we had enough to make a strong syndication library…so those 73 episodes were sold to local stations and they ran over and over and over. In the meantime, all the episodes that were produced were syndicated to other countries. They easily earned back all the money that the producers had put up to deficit-finance the show and to also make a very nice profit. In fact, the 73 reran so well in this country that we never bothered to syndicate the other 48 episodes in the U.S. once CBS turned loose of them. The math was such that we could make just as much money syndicating a package of 73 as opposed to a package of 121.

After we finished Show #121, CBS said they wanted to order another season but they wanted to renegotiate the deal. Because of the annual bumps in the license fee, the show had gotten very expensive. At the same time, the viewing audiences for all of Saturday morning TV had declined. When we went on the air in '88, the main place kids could watch cartoons was on CBS, NBC and ABC on Saturday mornings. By the time we went off, you had your Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon and the WB Network and Fox and a few others airing cartoons every day, in some cases morning, noon and night.

And there was another problem. A lot of those cartoon shows were being produced at a loss, mostly funded by toy companies. If we're such a company marketing a new doll called Braindead Duck, we want all of the kids in America to know of him and love him. It might be financially prudent for us to spend a few million underwriting a Braindead Duck cartoon show and to go to stations and say, "Hey, we'll give you this show real cheap if you'll put it on the air." We might lose a lot on the show but make it up selling more Braindead Duck merchandise.

I'm occasionally asked to be the show runner on such programs. One time, I told the man trying to hire me that I didn't think it was a very good idea for a show and asked, "Why would a network buy this?" He said, "Because we're going to offer it to them for one-fourth what a new series usually costs them." A number of shows have gotten on the air that way. His did. Sometimes, the toy company gives a local station the show for free and advertises its other toys in half the commercials. Then the station airing the show can sell the other commercials and keep the money they get for them. (Again, there are many variations.)

So CBS said to us, "We want another season of Garfield and Friends but we want it much cheaper. You're making so much off the domestic and foreign syndication — to say nothing of what it does for the cat's popularity in general — that we think you should do it for us for about a third of what we've been paying you." That, of course, would have meant a lot more deficit-financing from our side if we wanted to maintain the same level of quality.

Our producers did the math and decided the numbers didn't make sense. As I noted, we weren't even putting all the episodes we had into domestic syndication. What the additional episodes would have made in foreign syndication didn't really make up for the deficit costs. Also, with the reruns doing so well in syndication, Garfield didn't really need the exposure of being on Saturday morning…so our producers declined. CBS gave our time slot to a show that did cost about a third of what our show cost them and got about a third of the ratings. We would have probably dropped a lot over the next year or two because fewer and fewer kids were even bothering with the three major networks on Saturday morning by then. And that's more than you probably wanted to know but this is the weblog that always does that.

The e-mails that heated up the Chris Christie bridge scandal to boiling were uncovered by the Bergen Record, a small but apparently dedicated newspaper. How did they manage this? They tried something that you don't see much of, these days. It's called Investigative Reporting. Go read about it.

The folks who run Comic-Con International are explaining more about their new "one day" policy and it makes more sense now.

I know lots of folks, by the way, who deliberately attend only one day of the convention each year, often going to and fro via Amtrak train. They feel they get "enough" that way without the hassle and expense of having to book a hotel room. It is also not the dumbest thing in the world to plan a vacation in or around San Diego, staying somewhere far from the con and visiting it on one or two days. If you like zoos, the one in San Diego is a splendid way to spend a day and there are lots of other touristy-type things to do.

John Green tests out some "life hacks" found on the Internet. I'd never heard of most of these and for good reason. Most of them don't work. But maybe you'll find one or two that will be useful…

I'm following the Chris Christie story with some interest but not following it relentlessly due to a lack of time.

As Josh Marshall notes here, something doesn't make sense, mainly the motive. Governor Christie did seem rather convincing in his year-long press conference arguing that he hadn't sought the endorsement of the Mayor of Fort Lee so it made no sense that anyone would take revenge on him by closing down that bridge. Let me just toss out one thought here that I haven't seen anyone considering…

Back in the Nixon Days, one "scandal" that never happened was this: Several administration officials were furious with reporter Jack Anderson for some things he'd printed and one day, a senior Nixon aide — most accounts say it was Charles Colson — remarked aloud that it was imperative that someone "stop Anderson at all costs." Or perhaps the phrasing was a bit different. Whatever it was, it eventually caused special operative G. Gordon Liddy to believe he had been assigned to murder Anderson.

The details of who said what and how serious they were about this have been recounted many ways. Some say Liddy took some hyperbole too seriously but that before he could act, the misunderstanding was cleared up. Others say there was an actual decision to have the White House kill a reporter…and then they realized how much trouble that could cause. I dunno which it was but it is at least possible that it was all a misinterpretation or someone's overreaction.

Is it possible that's what happened with the George Washington Bridge incident? Maybe Christie, angry at New Jersey Democrats or someone in Fort Lee, said, "We've got to cause some trouble for those people" and his underlings took that a directive to do what they did.

This is speculation, of course, but I've always thought people were missing the most likely scenario when they asked, "Did Richard Nixon order the Watergate break-in?" It's always seemed more likely to me that Nixon ordered that kind of thing be done and didn't get into specifics. If people keep asking, "Did Chris Christie order the lane closures on the bridge?", they might miss the most likely answer in that matter. I'd be more interested if the folks who gave the order to snarl traffic thought they were ordered by Christie to do that kind of thing, if not that action in particular.