Monthly Archives: May 2014

As I mentioned here last December, Shout Factory is bringing out a DVD set of appearances, many of them quite obscure, that the Marx Brothers made on television. It's being assembled by my pal Robert Bader — in fact, he's the one who told me about it — and he does real good DVDs that we all must own.

Recently at a Marx Brothers festival, he and Dick Cavett discussed the set and gave the crowd a little preview. That presentation is discussed here.

Now, this is the point where I'd usually post an Amazon link so you can pre-order it. Here it is but before you click, read the following. You probably don't want to order it from Amazon. If you order from Shout Factory, you get four discs of Groucho, Harpo and Chico cavorting, individually and collectively, on television. You get the same three-disc set Amazon is selling plus you get a bonus disc.

As I post this, the price for the 3-disc set only from Amazon is $37.98. Amazon, of course, has its price guarantee. If there's a lower price by the time it's released (August 12), you get the lower price.

The same set with the bonus disc version can be purchased over on this website and it's currently cheaper ($34.97), plus they're promising delivery a month sooner.

I should probably keep my mouth shut because I get a tiny commission if you order from Amazon via my links, whereas I get bupkis from Shout Factory. But I can't do that to you…not after all we've been through together. So get it from Shout Factory…and don't tell them Groucho sent you because he didn't. It was me.

It's Baby Panda time. Nothing cuter on this planet…

• Dems should boycott the GOP's new Benghazi investigation. But they should promise to be there for next few Benghazi investigations.

Kevin Drum points us to an article that reminds us how Republicans first tried using Benghazi as a club against Obama. Back when it first happened, before anyone knew exactly what was happening, Mitt Romney was rearranging facts so he could use the incident as a campaign issue against the guy he was running against.

I caught a bit of Sean Hannity last week acting horrified at the notion that the Obama Administration "spun" the truth a bit to make themselves look better. Why don't I recall any outrage from Hannity and his crowd over the Bush Administration telling us point-blank that we had to go to war because Saddam had those indisputable Weapons of Mass Destruction? Which statement involved the loss of more American lives and limbs?

I feel like I must have covered this topic before but I just did a search of this blog and didn't spot it. Forgive me if this is a rerun. If it is, I bet I say pretty much the same thing I said the last time because this is a topic about which I've long held strong feelings.

Financial technology continues to improve in this country. I can sit at this here computer and transfer funds between my accounts or to the accounts of others. I can purchase stocks or securities in an instant. I can pay my property tax and my cable bill in five seconds. It's really amazing how rapidly people can now handle financial transactions.

But you know what transaction isn't speeding up? Paying writers.

I have been, as you may be sick of hearing me remind you here, a professional writer since 1969. I have worked for at least four hundred different companies including both publishers and producers, and I would guess that in less than twenty relationships, I have been paid with the same promptness they expect of me in turning in the work.

Matter of fact, a surprising (well, maybe not so surprising) percentage of the time, I find myself working for this kind of operation: They get hysterical at the sheer possibility that my script might be a day late…and then the part where they pay me is done with the attitude of "Hey, we'll get around to it one of these months."

It has never been too bad for me in TV jobs covered by the Writers Guild, especially when I had an agent who didn't get his cut until I got my pay. It has sometimes been very bad in magazine work, comic books and non-WGA animation work…though never on those shows I write about the lasagna-eating cat. Years ago on a panel about comics, someone asked us to list some of the qualities of a good editor. We all talked a lot about wisdom and efficiency and understanding…and I added this one: When your check is late, a good editor doesn't say, "That's some other department. I have nothing to do with that."

I worked for one company where you'd hand in the work and you were lucky if the check got to you before your sample copies of the published book. I asked the head guy there once why they couldn't just set it up so that if we turned in an assignment on Monday morning, someone wrote a check on Monday afternoon — or Tuesday at the latest. He grinned, said that wasn't humanly or otherwise possible, and with a certain glee, launched into an explanation that sounded something like this…

We worked out a very efficient system. When you hand in a script, the assistant editor fills out a blue form which is then initialed by the editor and it goes to our editorial coordinator who assigns a pay number to the job, then sends it down to Beulah in accounting. Assuming Beulah isn't on one of her bi-monthly jaunts to the Barbados, she stamps the blue form then makes out a check requisition form which goes back to the editorial coordinator who verifies the pay number, signs off on the form and then sends it to the outside accounting firm that processes our checks. Every Thursday afternoon at 3 PM, a man named Pedro at the outside firm processes all the check requisition forms he's received in the past week. If one doesn't bear the proper signatures, it of course has to be kicked back to us and made out again but if it does, he enters the data in the computer which prints out the checks downstairs for handling by a woman from Luxembourg named Helena. Helena checks the printed checks against the blue forms which have been sent over separately and if they match, she passes them on to the head of company who stops by every so often between hair transplants to okay the mailing of the checks. Once okayed, the check goes to the mailing room for addressing, which is done every third Monday of the month except for April, August and October when the mailing room closes for internal auditing. Once addressed, the envelopes and checks are matched up and they go to the sealing department where there's a whole staff of people with moist tongues to seal the envelopes, affix the postage and then one of them drops the checks in a mailbox on his or her way home. If they remember.

You can do it that way. Or you could just have one person write and mail a check.

That is a lot more do-able than they admit. When I ran the Hanna-Barbera comic book department in the seventies, I insisted on speedy payment and it was no trouble at all to set that up. I would fill out a little form and drop it off at the payroll department. If I got it in before 2 PM, the check would be ready within an hour. If I got it in after 2 PM, the check would be ready the next day. Some freelancers who worked for us would come in, drop off the work and go home with a check. At worst, they'd receive it by mail in two days.

A number of the artists drawing for us were super-reliable — folks like Paul Norris, Mike Royer and Dan Spiegle. Mike and Dan mailed their work in but Paul usually delivered it in person. I'd put through the form a day or two early and then when he handed me the pages, I'd hand him the check. Or if I hadn't put it through early, he'd come in before lunch, we'd go to lunch and then when we got back to the office, his check was waiting.

We did not do it this way because Paul (or most of our freelancers) desperately needed the check immediately. Most could have waited a week or three without missing a meal or a mortgage payment. It was just a courtesy to the reliable ones, a way of thanking them for delivering on time. It also, I'm quite sure, spurred the semi-reliable ones to be more reliable…and prolific. There was one artist who was drawing for us and also working for Western Publishing on their Gold Key comics and I wanted him to do more for us. He did once he realized how fast we paid. The rates were the same but Western took 2-3 weeks to get him a check.

I don't like being in a position where I'm responsible for people getting paid but when I am, that's how I try to arrange things. When I edited/wrote DNAgents and Crossfire for Eclipse Comics, I paid the artists immediately and then Eclipse paid me after I delivered the finished issue. On The Garfield Show, the cartoon I produce and voice-direct, we record shows on Monday and/or Tuesday. A payroll company out in Burbank prints out the checks on Thursday and messengers them to me for distribution to the actors' agents. Once in a while, an actor who's short on funds will come over and get his or hers that day or I'll have my assistant drive it over to them or their agency. I'm sure in these days, we could even set up direct-deposit if a payee wished it.

Still, when I've suggested this to many animation and comic book companies, I've gotten back looks of horror. "It can't be done," they'd say…and I understand why a few of them said this. They didn't want to pay promptly. They either didn't have a good cash flow or they liked the idea of making another nickel in interest off that money — and that's about how much they could make — by keeping it in the bank another week or two before paying it out. There was one publisher who seemed to like the sense of subservience (he obviously thought) it instilled in writers.

Mostly though, they just don't seem to think it matters. "People are clamoring to work for us," one animation producer said when I suggested same-day checks. Well, it matters to the folks getting the check. It also seems to improve accuracy to have the money paid immediately without passing through a dozen hands and departments.

It especially matters (and would help) if you were running a small, new publishing firm. Writers and artists like working for big, established outfits because they figure that, no matter what happens, the money will be there. You may not be paid for a few weeks but you'll be paid. It's tough to write or draw something if you're nervous that isn't going to happen; that by the time you hand it in to the company, there won't be any company. A small company could counter that worry to a large extent by being super-prompt with payments. I wish more of them would try it. I wish everyone would pay writers more promptly because, damn it, we deserve it. Some of us, anyway.

Ten minutes with Jon Oliver…

Okay, so Stephen Colbert will do his last Colbert Report on December 17 and then some time in January, that slot will be filled by The Minority Report starring Daily Show correspondent Larry Wilmore. This will reportedly be in the format of a panel show, though scripted. All right. That could work. Wilmore's a pretty funny guy.

Before anyone asks what will fill the time between the last Colbert program and the first Wilmore offering, I would guess Comedy Central will use that plum spot to showcase some of their other shows…or maybe rerun old Colbert Reports. They may not even have decided that yet.

They haven't announced yet when Colbert will replace Letterman but I'll give you a guess: My birthday.

Letterman's last few weeks figure to attract mucho viewers. So will Colbert's first shows as people tune in to see what he's going to do. If CBS had some huge event like the Olympics early in '15, they'd probably time things to use that to promote Colbert's debut. The Olympics helped to get Jimmy Fallon off to a good start.

I don't think CBS has anything comparable so they'll probably just concern themselves with timing the ratings heat to occur during one of the "sweeps" periods. That's when networks want to get the highest numbers to use in setting future ad rates.

The February 2015 ratings sweeps period runs from Thursday, February 5 until Wednesday, March 4. That leads me to think Dave will do his last show on Friday, February 27 and then Stephen will start on Monday, March 2, which happens to be my birthday. Johnny Carson did his last Tonight Show on May 22, 1992, which was the end of the last full week of that year's May sweeps and then Jay Leno debuted before they were over. (The sweeps period following the February 2015 one begins April 28. I don't think Colbert would be taking himself off the air on Comedy Central on 12/17 if he wouldn't be starting his new show until the end of May.)

A lot of folks, self included, have been wondering if Colbert would move into the Ed Sullivan Theater. I'm thinking not. Colbert will spend a month or three assembling a staff and setting up offices and pre-taping segments and rehearsing and doing test shows…and if he moved into the Ed, it would probably be necessary to do a lot of renovations. CBS will not want to leave a month of Letterman reruns or other programming between Dave's last show and Stephen's first. So my guess is Colbert will do his show from somewhere else, at least at first. That way, Dave and his crew — some of whom have been there for more than twenty years — can take their own sweet time about packing up and getting out. Dave, of course, could keep offices there for whatever else he may do.

Lastly for now, there's still no news on who's going to replace Craig Ferguson…or what's going to become of Geoff Peterson (the gay robot skeleton) and the horse suit. I hope they put one or both in the Smithsonian right next to Archie Bunker's chair, Fonzie's leather jacket and Bob Barker.

Did you know that my pal Floyd Norman animated on Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? You may find this hard to believe but he did. That movie was made before Floyd was born but he didn't let a little thing like that stop him. Here — I'll steal part of the explanation from his fine blog…

It was the fifties and Walt Disney Productions had already launched a weekly television show on ABC. The Old Maestro and his creative staff were busily looking for projects they could exploit. Walt knew his audience delighted in seeing behind the scenes stuff and what goes on in the making of an animated film. Disney's writers came up with a brilliant idea. Since so much energy and imagination go into the making of an animated film what if we allowed the Disneyland audience to see material that never made it into the finished motion picture? A good example would be "Snow White." Animator Ward Kimball had put a good deal of effort into two sequences that never made it into the completed film. One sequence featured the seven dwarfs building Snow White's bed. However, the material Walt decided to show was the famous soup eating sequence. There was even a delightful song written by composer, Frank Churchill. It was entitled, "The Rhythm in Your Soup." Even better, the song recorded back in the nineteen thirties was still in the Disney's vault. Television audiences would finally see an entertaining sequence that had been "hidden" for years.

However, once the unseen footage was pulled from the archive, the Old Maestro had a major concern. The animation was fun and entertaining, but the sketches were clearly loose and rough. Perhaps a little too rough for television audiences not used to viewing rough animation. Walt Disney made the decision to clean up the footage. He wanted the drawings a little tighter, yet not so much as to lose the energy and vitality of the animator's original drawings. A crew was needed to get the soup eating sequence ready for prime time.

The year was 1956, and a group of young animation apprentices had just been hired. Having completed their thirty days of training, the young animation trainees were moved into a large room in 1-F, on the first floor of the Animation Building. I was one of those young trainees and our first assignment was to clean-up the rough sketches in Ward Kimball's soup eating sequence.

There's more on Floyd's blog which you should read often. In fact, if you're interested in animation, you should especially read this post on respectability for animators. You can check it out after you watch the soup sequence that Floyd was discussing…

Once upon a time, I had a good friend named Don Segall, who wrote for television and sometimes for comic books. Don passed away in 1994 and I wrote about him in this column.

Bob Elisberg was also privileged to know Don. He recently wrote this piece about him.

I realized I may have left out one part of the story about the lady at the market who couldn't afford to pay for her groceries…

As I haven't mentioned here lately, I feed feral cats in my back yard. At one point, I was up to four who turned up on my back porch every evening: The Stranger Cat, Max, Lydia and Sylvia. The Stranger Cat, as discussed here, passed away two years ago.

Max — a cat so large that if you wanted to turn him around, you had to employ the PIT maneuver, disappeared in November of that year. I wrote about that here. That left me with the ones I'd named Lydia and Sylvia.

Lydia still comes around. Lydia is the cat who, back in 2008, I spent days trapping so I could take her into the vet for a pussycat abortion and a procedure that guaranteed she could never get that way again. You can see a photo of her here. She still comes around almost every night for chow.

Up until around ten days ago, Sylvia was usually with her. They've become close friends, always nuzzling and watching out for each other. In the photo below, you can see a photo of Sylvia from back in the days when she and Max were, as they say, an item. She's the one on top.

Ten days ago, Sylvia disappeared. There's a lot of construction going on next door to me and I figured that had scared her off…but ten days is a long time to not see a cat who seemed dependent on me for food. I figured either something bad happened to her or she found someplace else to get a steady flow of food and would no longer come this way.

Early in the evening, I fed Lydia and since she was alone again, I decided to just presume Sylvia was gone for good.

Then as mentioned, I went to the market at 3 AM. When I got back, two ladies were waiting on my back steps for me: Lydia and Sylvia. I asked Sylvia where she'd been but with a coy look in her eyes, she refused to tell me. That was okay. I fed her anyway. That's how happy I was to see her.

I don't know why she came back but I can't shake the feeling that it had something do with helping that lady in the market.

The Monty Python guys have a new album out. Here's the music video for what they call, and with good reason, "The Lousy Song"…

Last night in a supermarket about 3 AM, I saw a woman have a serious breakdown. She was buying some items — not a lot, maybe $35.00 worth of cheese, meat and cereal. A basic shopping list. The checkout clerk rang her up, she swiped her credit card —

— and it was declined. No good. Not accepted.

The clerk was very polite in informing her she'd have to pay some other way but she had no other way: No cash, no other card. She did not seem shocked that her card was rejected; just that it had happened sooner than expected. "I thought I had more money left," she muttered before bursting into tears. They were not tears of embarrassment. They were tears of desperation and panic and "I don't know what to do anymore." (That was something else she said.)

I was two back from her in line. The man after her and ahead of me was an Orthodox Jew — beard, black suit and hat, ziziths dangling from under his coat. We stood there and watched this poor woman weeping. She was about 45, maybe 50. She looked sad before the clerk gave her the bad news, and you could tell it was the latest in a long string. "I can't pay," she moaned. "I don't know what to do."

The checkout clerk didn't know what to do, either. He gave a look to those of us in line. It seemed to be saying, "Please…let's give her a minute." No one in line was impatient.

And then the woman let out a cry. I cannot describe it. If I was writing a scene in a TV show and I wanted an actress to make that sound, I have no idea what words I would put on the page to tell her what I had in mind. I'd probably write something about a cry of pain that seemed to say, "I can't endure any more of this…there is too much pain in my life."

That still wouldn't get the actress to make that sound but it might summarize what was on that poor woman's mind at that moment. Clearly, she could not pay. Clearly, she could not get on with her life in any way without groceries.

I saw the gentleman ahead of me take out his wallet and check how much he had. I whispered to him, "I'll split it with you." Behind me, the next person in line pulled out a ten and a couple of others kicked in. There were at least ten people waiting to pay at this, the only counter open at this hour. Most of us got together and paid for the woman's groceries and we gave her about thirty dollars in cash that she really seemed to need.

She cried about that too, crying at the generosity but also, I'm sure, that she was dependent on, as they say, the kindness of strangers. She thanked us about eighty times and then made her way with her purchases out the door. (In my area, they have to charge now for paper bags. I noticed that the checker didn't charge her for the ones she needed.)

I have no idea where she was going. I wonder if she did.

The gent in front of me paid for his purchases and departed wordlessly. As I swiped my credit card, I turned to the people after me and said, "If this isn't accepted, you're all paying for my English Muffins." A bit of a laugh. Then I asked the checker, "How often does that happen?"

He said, "Maybe twice a week. When it happens, it happens most often on the late shift. But usually, they swear the card is good and our system is screwed-up. They get angry at us, like it's our fault they can't pay. Sometimes, customers like you pay for them. A couple of times, I've felt so bad for the people that I've paid for them. That's if it's only a few dollars. I couldn't have paid for this woman. Not on what we get paid here."

The next person in line said, "If you pay for them, do they come back the next night figuring you'll pay for them again?"

He said, "No, never. We never see them again. That woman who just left here…you will never see her in this market again. It's too painful. It just reminds them of how bad off they were that night."

Health care is so politicized in this country now that it's come to this: Someone had to conduct a study and issue a report to affirm the premise that you're less likely to die prematurely if you can afford medical treatment. Really. Here's the last paragraph of the article I just linked to…

Dr. Benjamin Sommers, the Harvard University School of Public Health assistant professor who led the study, agreed, saying, "It seems pretty clear that expanding insurance coverage will lead to gains in saving lives." Obamacare's Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) component is also conducting its own experiment to examine the effects of expanding health care, and will be key in determining whether the Massachusetts results were state-specific. But until then, Jonathan Gruber, an MIT professor who worked on both the Massachusetts and national health care reforms, says, "We should basically be back to our presumption that health insurance improves health."

We may soon have a controversial finding that you're more likely to keep your teeth if you can afford to go to a dentist now and then. At least it would be controversial if Barack Obama says it's so.

In their book The Illusion of Life — now outta-print and beastly expensive — Disney Legends Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston identified twelve "principles" of animation. Animator Cento Lodigiani has made this little video to list and demonstrate them…

A lot of folks have written me to ask what my e-mail problem is with Time-Warner and if it's fixed yet. No, it's not fixed, in large part because it's not a constant problem, the kind you can analyze because it always happens…and then you can know when it's gone because it doesn't happen anymore.

What it is is not easy to explain so don't think you're dumb if you can't understand this: I have several e-mail addresses that are mostly "at" domains that I own. For instance, I own www.newsfromme.com. If you write to me at www.newsfromme.com, your e-mail is then forwarded to the address that Time-Warner gives me and I pick up that message via my account with them. As a back-up, that same e-mail is simultaneously forwarded to a GMail account I have.

It has come to my attention the last few weeks that I have not been receiving all my e-mails. I've also noticed that a few e-mails that do get to me arrive in my Time-Warner mailbox many, many hours — in a few cases, days — after they've been sent. I finally took the time to investigate and found that the messages that never showed up in my Time-Warner mailbox, or showed up late, turned up on time in the GMail backup.

This does not happen all the time. Around 85% of all messages sent to me show up in both at the same time. But I monitored both for a few days and discovered that about 15% weren't arriving in the Time-Warner mailbox or were delayed for some time.

During my marathon Tech Support calls yesterday, I had six other incoming telephone calls that I ignored so they went to voicemail. I have Time-Warner digital home phone service and when a call goes to voicemail, a nice little robot at Time-Warner sends me an e-mail to inform me. All six of those messages showed up instantly in my GMail account. Only four showed up in my Time-Warner account. So messages that Time-Warner was sending me weren't making it into my Time-Warner mailbox.

And no, I did not have any incoming messages blocked and no, they did not go into my Spam folder and no, the missing messages were not huge in size. The gent at Tier 2 Technical Support there who took 75 minutes to not solve the problem and then accidentally disconnected me insisted on operating on the following assumption: Time-Warner e-mail works flawlessly and if I'm not getting all my messages, I must have something set wrong on my computer. I could not knock him off that premise.

Finally, after way too much time on the phone, redialing and redialing when they hung up on me, I got to a guy in Tier 3 who acknowledged my settings were correct so the problem must be elsewhere. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, that problem does not happen all the time. It didn't happen with several e-mails he sent me. So we're monitoring the situation and I'm tracking when it happens and we're going to continue this discussion. I simply ran out of time and energy to deal with it last night.

Actually, the problem I think they should be working to fix is the one where you call Tech Support and they keep you on hold for long, long periods and then drop your call. That Undercover Boss TV show has what I think is an intriguing premise. If you own or run a company, you should be required to call your support people once a month and see what it's like to get them on the line and talk to them.