Monthly Archives: March 2014

Michael Hiltzik notes that we hear a lot of bogus, collapsible tales of Obamacare being a disaster but don't hear nearly enough about its many successes. And Sahil Kapur notes that Republicans who want to "repeal and replace" are having a hard time coming up with the "replace" part. Hey, you can't beat something with nothing.

This is your Soup Reminder. It's to remind you that you have a little more than a week to get yourself to a Souplantation or Sweet Tomatoes restaurant (here's where they are) for a bowl or nine of their Classic Creamy Tomato Soup. I like this soup a lot and regret that they only offer it one month per year. Fortunately, it's a month with 31 days in it but it's still not enough. Here's a coupon that's good today and tomorrow for two folks to dine there for $19.78.

I am not a shareholder in Souplantation. I just spend a lot of money there…on soup.

• I'm kinda hoping that at some point, someone told Fred Phelps there would be Gay Marriage in Michigan and he said, "Over my dead body!"

The world's greatest spy (Cookie Monster) teaches you how to follow directions…

I will be a guest-type person at WonderCon in Anaheim, California from April 18 to 20. I will be hosting six panels or events, including a panel with Sergio Aragonés, a Cartoon Voice panel and a panel on the history of Hanna-Barbera with folks who worked there in the sixties, plus I'll be speaking on Writing for Animation. The full programming schedule will be available shortly on the convention website.

Whenever I speak on Writing for Animation, I start the "class" by letting the audience vote: Do they want to hear about how to write scripts? Or do they want to hear about how to get jobs? The vote is always close enough to 50-50 that I wind up splitting the time to cover both. I assume it will go that way this time.

It's not on their website yet but I will also be a guest at the Phoenix Comicon in guess-what-city on June 5-8. I've never been to this one but I'm told a great time is had by all, so I've decided to accept their invite and go have a great time. I will be doing some panels but I dunno about them yet.

Then I will be in my usual role at the Comic-Con International in San Diego. which this year runs July 24-27, meaning it actually starts the night of July 23 for those who score Preview Night badges. I will be hosting 243,000 panels…or an average of one per attendee. It'll be a while before we hear about them…but in a week or two, they should be announcing this year's recipients of the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing, and I think a lot of folks are going to be delightfully surprised at the selections.

And that's it for my dance card at the moment.

• Just saw they're going to start running one of my first TV gigs, Welcome Back, Kotter on Me-TV. Oh, good. I can use the dimes.

Teller (of "Penn &…") just won a significant victory over someone he felt was infringing on his "rose" trick. Magic tricks cannot be copyrighted but pantomimes can…and Teller managed to convince a judge his pantomime had been purloined. Good for him.

The management of this site agrees with Chris Hayes. People with zero evidence about what happened to that missing plane should stop using the situation to promote some fear-based agenda…

I tried to watch a bit of CNN this morning but there is apparently no news on the planet except the latest "lead" in the disappearance of Flight 370. Apparently, rumors that someone saw something floating somewhere are significant unless they're not, in which case others might be…until still others come along.

The more I think about it, the more I think Fred Phelps may have done more to speed along Gay Rights in this country than an awful lot of acknowledged champions of that cause. A friend of mine who is, as they say, "uncomfortable" with the idea of Same-Sex Marriage agrees with me. He has issues with it and we've talked about them in a friendly manner. A "friendly manner" in this case means that neither of us accuses the other of being about to destroy civilization and morality. My friend still doesn't think two men or two women should be allowed to wed but (a) he accepts it as inevitable and (b), he sure doesn't want to be on the side of people like Phelps, who sure seems to have been way more screwed-up — and contrary to the teachings of Jesus — than anyone he ever condemned.

You know, I support live theater and buy many tickets and attend many productions. I wish I could make one purchase from one theater group without getting eleven phone calls from a nice person who works for them and would like me to make a donation and/or subscribe to a whole season of plays that don't interest me.

There's still time to place bids on nifty pieces of art in the CAPS Auction to benefit Stan and Sharon Sakai. If you don't want to do it for them, do it for yourself. There are some real bargains there.

The last part of my story about my Grandmother's funeral will be along in a couple of days. We appreciate your patience.

My pal Leonard Maltin got to be a question (or rather, an answer) on Jeopardy! last evening…

In case you don't get it, his entire review consisted of the word "no" and it got him into the Guinness Book of World Records for writing the world's shortest movie review. In 2008 when the movie Who Do You Love? came out, I was waiting for someone to try and best him by writing a review that merely consisted of the letter "I." It would have been gramatically-incorrect but it would have been half the length of Leonard's wordy review.

I'll link you here to a list someone made up of the Ten Best Jewish Delis in Los Angeles. What it actually is is a list of all the major delicatessens in Los Angeles except Jerry's — and I'm not sure Jerry's, even back when it was good, qualified as a Jewish deli. It was (and is, assuming they haven't closed the last one yet) kind of a Jewish Deli in the same sense that Beefaroni is Italian Food.

Of the ten, my three favorites are — in this order — Canter's, Nate 'n Al's and Art's. Label's Table probably shouldn't be on the list because it's more of a sandwich place…though they will sell you a corned beef on rye that's as good as any in town for about 40% less. I haven't yet been to the newest one on the list, Lenny's. It's apparently doing well, replacing Junior's, a long-time favorite in that building that plunged in quality.

During my brief foray into the restaurant business, a man who was supposedly well-versed in that industry told me, "There are only two reasons why a new restaurant fails — bad management or bad location. And there are only two reasons why an old, established restaurant closes — bad management or new competition." I suggested a number of other reasons…like changing tastes in food or an outbreak of Hepatitis but to him, these came under the heading of "bad management."

Hepatitis was one of the reasons the Jerry's Delicatessen in Westwood went under. Those used to be great places to eat but they seem to be disappearing faster than Chris Christie supporters. They had great sandwiches, great potato latkes and the best chicken soup in town. The only downside was that if you went to the one in Studio City back in the late seventies, there was a good chance that your busboy would be Andy Kaufman, being obnoxious and inept for his own amusement…and no one else's.

Since my food allergies limit the vegetables I can eat, I eat a lot of the ones I can eat. One is carrots. I eat a lot of what they call "baby carrots." Apparently, a lot of people are scandalized to learn that these are not tiny, young carrots that are grown that size. I've always known how they came to be. If you don't, here's the story…

Anti-gay fanatic Fred Phelps has died. The obvious temptation is to gather outside his funeral with signs calculated to cause as much discomfort as possible to his friends and family. Let them see what it feels like.

But Tyler Lopez says we should just cheer for the unity that his antics provoked to energize the movement for gay rights in this country…and I think that's good advice. The last few years, a lot of people in this country found themselves on the fence on issues like Gay Marriage and increasingly pressured to take a side. They looked at the folks fighting for gay rights and they looked at the folks opposing them…and as long as the face of the latter group was Fred Phelps and his Westboro Alleged Baptists, they had no trouble deciding who were the good guys.

A fellow named Tony Figueroa put this together and it's wonderful. It's a history of the Universal Cities Studio Tour and a celebration of the energetic, often talented folks who conducted it.

I have a little history with the tour. In August of 1969, I was hired to revise and update the basic script that the tour guides used. For the first decade or so that Universal offered this tour, taking people all over its backlot in trams, it was quite different from what it later became. There were no Disneyland-style elements with robot monsters or thrills. It was just a tour of the backlot, showing you buildings you might recognize from movies or TV shows, taking you through a soundstage and through what was represented as an actual star's dressing room. It was usually Lucille Ball's and I wonder if she ever set foot in it.

Since there was a lot of filming then on the lot — Universal movies, Universal TV shows, plus plenty of projects where they were renting space to non-Universal films and shows — the tour had to be constantly rerouted and changed, sometimes permanently, sometimes just until some production finished filming in a certain area. As the tour changed, the script was no longer applicable…and tour guides who often didn't know much about the lot's history had to ad-lib. At one point, the tour was going past a certain ancient house and the guides took to saying it was featured in many Laurel and Hardy comedies. Laurel and Hardy, of course, never filmed on the Universal lot.

So I got the job of revising the script to reflect what the tour (then) actually showed. Years later when I became friends with the TV writer Stanley Ralph Ross, he told me that he'd written a script for them around 1968 but I don't think what I revised had much of Stanley's handiwork in it by '71. The amount Stanley told me he'd been paid for his work was about ten times what I was paid so I figure it was at least double.

The money sucked but I did it just so I could spend a few days wandering around the Universal lot, which I did. They gave me a little go-cart but I preferred to walk…and walk I did, all over that tremendous hunk of real estate. Most interesting thing I saw? Alfred Hitchcock. I told that story back here.

I stalled handing in my script because once I did, I'd be off the lot…but finally, they demanded it. When I delivered the material, the fellow who'd hired me asked if I wanted to test it out. I asked, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, maybe go out as a tour guide for a few days and test it out." That hadn't occurred to me but I decided it might be fun. So the next day, I tag-teamed with an experienced guide and we jointly conducted three tours. The first was fun, the second was less fun and by the third time around, I was thinking that would be the last time for me. I did though make some good (I thought) revisions in the script based on those test-drives.

At the end of the tour, the tourists were deposited at a place called the Entertainment Center where they could buy refreshments and souvenirs, see a show with trained animals, see a show with stunt people and actually meet an actor. The studio would engage some TV star to hang around all day and sign autographs and chat with people. At the time I was there, it was Bob Hastings from McHale's Navy.

As I neared the end of what I knew would be my last go-round as a tour guide, I made the scripted (by someone else) pitch about the Entertainment Center. I told them they'd be able to meet an actor there and a woman in the back of the tram yelled out, "Can I meet Tony Franciosa?" I immediate said, "No, I said an actor." Big laugh…but a fellow who was on the tour I was conducting didn't think it was so funny. He was Tony Franciosa's publicist.

He headed, fuming, for the office of the fellow who'd employed me who, of course, did not tell him I was the person writing the script from which all the other tour guides would be reading. He just said, "We'll get rid of that despicable tour guide! Imagine saying such an awful thing about that great star of many Universal TV shows, Tony Franciosa!" (By the way, I had nothing against Mr. Franciosa. It was just a joke. If the lady had asked about seeing Gene Barry or David Janssen, I would have given her the same response.)

I'm not sure if I was fired as a Universal Tour Guide because I already planned to never do it again…and also, I'd never actually been hired as a Universal Tour Guide, nor was I paid for being one. But I was paid for my script and I got a bunch of free passes to take the tour. About eight months later when a friend was in from out of town, I did. The guide used most of my script, including the little joke where she pointed out the house used in the movie, Psycho, then pointed out a little walkway next to it and said, "That's called the Psycho Path." I am told that line stayed in the tour for a long, long time. Oh, the residuals some of us never get.

Here's Tony's film. You'll want to take the image full-screen and you may just find yourself watching the whole half hour…

Fred Kaplan on how the West can stop Putin. I'd feel more confident if Fred was Secretary of State instead of John Kerry.