Monthly Archives: January 2015

Back on 11/29/03, I posted this piece on Castle Films. I still have a box downstairs here full of the Castle Films I bought as a child, plus I have a few dozen other 8mm movies from other companies that followed in Castle's footsteps. I have no projector on which to show these movies but I have the movies and can't bear to part with them…

For no visible reason, I found myself thinking about Castle Films this morning…and about how in this age of home video, they seem so primitive. Castle Films was for a time the leading manufacturer of 8mm movies. They were sold in camera shops and in the back of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine, and a lot of us thought it was the neatest thing to be able to own and show a copy of Dracula or a Woody Woodpecker cartoon at home, even if it was silent and cut down to 4 minutes. That's not quite as bad as it sounds because a few of those old Universal horror films and comedies didn't lose all that much in that format. The one reel, non-talkie version of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein just about encapsulated everything that was fun about that cinema classic.

Castle Films was founded in 1924 by a man named Eugene Castle. This was before 8mm. Castle distributed 16mm movies — mostly newsreels and sports highlights — sold almost exclusively via mail order and in photography shops. There was also a successful business selling prints to film rental companies that would rent them out for non-theatrical exhibition…say, at a school or club function.

In the thirties and early forties, the main Castle product was what were called "soundies," which were short films that were the music videos of the day. In some bars and restaurants, you could put a dime in a machine and view a "soundie" of Glenn Miller's orchestra playing their latest record…or you could buy a Castle Film of it and watch it over and over and over at home. In the post-World War II years, there was a huge uptick in the market for 16mm projectors, so Castle Films sold a lot of "soundies." Around 1947, the company was so successful that Mr. Castle sold it to a company called United World Films.

His timing was great. Soon after, another company stole the rights to the "soundies" away and Castle Films lost its most important item. To fill the void, the new owners made a deal with Universal Studios to release scenes from some of their movie musicals on 16mm and this led to them also putting out excerpts from other Universal movies, most notably Abbott and Costello films, monster movies and the Walter Lantz cartoons (like Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda) that Universal distributed. They continued to also market newsreels and travelogues and also began releasing films in the 8mm format that was becoming increasingly popular for home movies.

There was a certain artistry in the editing. Most Castle Films came in two versions…a 50-foot reel (3-4 minutes) and a 200-foot reel (12-16). Someone had to take an 85-minute movie and edit the abridged versions, preferably selecting action with a minimum of dialogue. The technology of motion picture production marched in reverse as they made silent films out of talkies, adding in title cards where necessary. The editors for Castle were pretty good about keeping them to a minimum.

Around 1949, Castle Films figured into a notable Hollywood "first." Though their popularity was on a definite decline, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were still among Universal's highest-grossing stars. Their manager, the legendary Eddie Sherman, had actually secured for them a contract that paid them a percentage of the profits from their films…almost unheard-of at the time. Oddly, though Universal remained eager to put out more Abbott and Costello films, the studio maintained that the films were not breaking even…ergo, no profit checks to Bud and Lou. It was an early example of "Hollywood Accounting," in which the books are juggled so that all sorts of expenses are charged against the film, thereby reducing its net on paper, making it possible for the studio to argue that there are no profits to share.

Sherman knew his boys were being cheated but he was in a chicken-and-egg quandary. He could not get a look at the accounting ledgers unless he sued the studio…and he couldn't find a basis on which to sue the studio if he couldn't see those ledgers. One day, while walking down Vine Street in Hollywood, he passed a camera shop with a window display for Castle Films of Abbott and Costello. That was the excuse he needed. He sued Universal on behalf of his clients and gained access to the books, which displayed all manner of financial irregularity. They wound up settling out of court for a very large sum of cash, but it was probably the movie industry's first dispute of the sort, starting a tradition that continues to this day and now involves DVDs.

Castle Films dominated the home movie market to such an extent that their name almost became generic. To this day, one sees eBay merchants auctioning off the product of competing films like Blackhawk Films, Atlas Films, Ken Films or Entertainment Films…all referred to as"Castle Films," in much the same way most people refer to any brand of facial tissue as "Kleenex." Throughout the sixties, their top sellers were the films featuring the classic Universal monsters (Frankenstein, Wolfman, Dracula, etc.) and those starring Abbott and Costello. Rumor has it that, no surprise, their all-time best-seller was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. But the mostly widely-available Castle Film was a 4-minute chop-down of Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops entitled Have Badge, Will Chase, which was used as a kind of low-cost introductory film to, they hoped, get people hooked on Castle Films. Issued in the hundreds of thousands, it came free with one popular brand of 8mm movie projector and when that deal soured, leftover copies were dumped on the camera store market as loss leaders. At a time when other 4-minute Castle Films cost $6.00, Have Badge, Will Chase went for $1.98 or less. As a result, it was the only Castle Film that some people ever owned.

16mm died out for them in the mid-sixties, which was about when 8mm sales hit their peak. Universal Studios acquired an increasing percentage of the company until eventually they owned it all and renamed it "Universal-8" — or sometimes, "Universal Super-8," as the Super-8mm movie format became more popular. Ironically perhaps, Universal chose to diversify beyond their own catalogue and began licensing the rights to put out movies owned by others. Almost every other major studio also tried establishing an 8mm division but it was too late. The market fell off during the seventies, not just for movies you could show at home but for all 8mm equipment. Even before the Betamax and home video recorders appeared on the scene, most 8mm film companies were defunct. The former Castle Films operation seems to have put out its last items in 1981.

Folks who still own 8mm projectors (an increasingly-scarce device) still sometimes collect Castle Films for the nostalgia. There isn't a lot of point to even threading the Bell and Howell to run a silent excerpt of Dracula when the entire movie, with sound, can be rented at Blockbuster and popped into the VCR. But some of us still hold a fond memory for the days when you could actually run a movie for your friends in the comfort of your own home. At the time, that seemed like a very big deal.

The Oscar nominations came out Thursday morn and, of course, with nominees come non-nominees. Most of the news stories yesterday seemed to focus not on who was nominated but who wasn't.

That's better fodder for the cable talk shows and scandal sites, of course, but it's also kind of silly. I was going to write a post on how absurd it was to say someone had been "snubbed" but then I saw that my friend Steve Stoliar had posted the following on Facebook. So here, with his permission…

If the members of the MP Academy got together and, amongst themselves, said, "Who don't we want to be nominated?" and then discussed it in a big room and then decided — in unison — who to keep out of the nominations — especially for some petty reason — that is a snub. But when each member marks a ballot in secrecy, based on his/her opinion — informed, intelligent, or otherwise — of who deserves a vote — always a subjective thing; there's no such thing as a film, actor, song, book, painting that everybody loves or everybody hates — that is not a snub. It is — wait for it — democracy in action, like it or not.

When there are more Best Picture nominees allowed than for any other category, it is statistically impossible to have each Best Picture director also nominated in the Best Director category. The lack of inclusion does not mean that director did a shitty job or "the movie must've directed itself" (that tired, meaningless cliché), or that the Academy conspired to keep their names off the list. It means the others got more votes than they did, so they didn't make the cut. You can rail about not enough women, not enough blacks, not enough black women, etc. etc. etc. and you can see it as some shameful snubbing conspiracy that must stop this very minute, but that is the simple truth. Whether you choose to extrapolate something more sinister from it is your choice.

One other point and this is M.E. again: Marion Cotillard got a nomination for Best Actress. Jennifer Aniston didn't and they're saying she was "snubbed." But we don't know the vote totals. Maybe Cotillard got one more vote than Aniston. Maybe Aniston missed the cut-off by one vote. That wouldn't be much of a snub, would it?

*If you don't know who Snub Pollard was, here's who he was.

When David Letterman switched over to CBS in 1993, the network spent a lotta loot promoting his arrival. One of the less expensive things they did was to lasso Dave into doing a lot of promos for the various local news programs that his new show would be following.

Here's a reel that was sent out so that local stations could build promos that included him. If it gets tedious, zip ahead to about the last five minutes when they have him rattling off copy he clearly doesn't care about…

Jonathan Chait doesn't believe Mitt Romney will really run for president. I don't, either. I mean, the guy might run the way Herman Cain or Donald Trump ran last time — as a vehicle of personal promotion. But Romney's not going to be the candidate. He was the C.E.O. President who could run the country like a successful business…but he couldn't parlay bad economic news for the Democrats into a victory. How's the G.O.P. going to let him try again when the news is better?

I have fixed one of my two e-mail problems. For the last week or so, mails sent to my main e-mail address on this site were not getting to me and now they are. I still have to deal with the problem that a few of them take 2-3 days to get to me but that's just a matter of me finding someone at Time-Warner Tech Support who understands that the Internet is not just a series of tubes. That should be doable…eventually.

Let's go back to 4/6/02 on this blog…one of a series of posts I was doing around then about things that mattered to my childhood. This one's about Flav-R Straws, which are no longer made under that name. There are a few other versions around of what is essentially the same product. One is called Magic Milk Straws. I doubt they mean as much to kids today as Flav-R Straws did to me and my friends…

Time to reminisce about another food product of my childhood…and I'm being very liberal with my definition of a "food product" by applying it to Flav-R Straws. They were, of course, another plot by the chemical geniuses of Corporate America to turn kids' milk some odd color. In this case, the options were pink and a pale beige, though they somehow claimed these had something to do with "strawberry," "chocolate" and other "flavors."

A Flav-R Straw was an ordinary drinking straw with a flexible section — so you could bend it towards your mouth instead of moving your head two inches — and an odd, semi-toxic filament. Nestled inside each straw was a piece of porous material — a paper product, I suspect, though it could have been a sliver of animal skin, for all I know. The tiny strip was impregnated with the alleged flavor — that is to say, alleged chocolate or alleged strawberry or alleged whatever — and a whole load of Industrial Strength Food Coloring in brown or red variety.

The premise was that you'd stick one of these suckers in a glass of milk and then, as you sucked upon it, the pristine, white moo juice would pass through the filter and take on the hue and taste of it. And as you repeatedly dipped the straw, the remaining milk in the glass would be similarly transformed. My recollection is that it really didn't work that way or that well. For one thing, to get the milk through the blockade at all, you had to suck so hard, you practically developed a compound hernia in your cheek muscles. For another, even the small amount of milk that made it through was only faintly tinted or altered in any way. You could transfer a bit more "flav-r" to the milk by rapidly dipping the straw into the glass and withdrawing it, over and over for about an hour, but this felt silly and it still turned the liquid only slightly off-white.

Most kids just gave up and removed the Flav-R strip from the straw and tried sucking directly on it. Employed that way, it would yield a bitter taste but, at least, it turned your tongue brown so that had some value. Still, Flav-R Straws were a colossal disappointment…and, now that I think of it, that had a value, as well. We all have to learn in life that some things just don't work as advertised. Better we should learn it on something as silly and low-cost as Flav-R Straws. It fosters a kind of Consumer Skepticism that can be very handy, later in life. Then again, so can learning to suck real hard.

One last remembrance of Flav-R Straws: One time when we were both straining to get milk through ours, the girl who lived down the street from me asked what would happen if you tried to use a Flav-R Straw in a glass of Coca-Cola. I told her she would instantly die. She decided not to chance it.

I continue to enjoy the Neil Simon Fest on Turner Classic Movies, ably hosted by our pal Ken Levine. I wish I knew how to do Chromakey on my computer. They have Ken standing in a blank blue setting and it would be fun to matte him into backgrounds of the North Pole or the Star Wars cantina or a gay bar or something.

Let's see. I watched Murder by Death the other night and didn't enjoy it as much as I did the first time I saw it. I watched The Cheap Detective, which I didn't like in the theaters, and liked less on TCM. Got about a third of the way through, then TiVo-skipped my way to see Ken's outro.

Does anyone know what the story was with Phil Silvers in that movie? He was billed as a star but only had one line and three seconds on screen. Obviously, he was suffering from the effects of his stroke but I'm wondering if that role was much larger when it was cast or if he was signed for a larger part then downgraded when it became obvious he couldn't deliver lines? Either way, it's sad to see such a great performer in such an easily-missable cameo.

I watched Plaza Suite and thought how wonderful Maureen Stapleton was in the first part and how good Walter Matthau was in (only) the third part.

That third playlet — the one about the bride locking herself in the bathroom — is killer material. I saw Carol Burnett and George Kennedy do it on stage (directed by Danny Simon!) and it was one of the funniest things I ever saw in my life. Fifteen or so years ago, a producer I knew was trying to set up a new production of Plaza Suite for cable and he was asking everyone for recommendations of which current stars to cast in each of the acts. I offered to give him the contents of my wallet — about $28 at the time — if he'd make the third couple British and book John Cleese and Tracey Ullman. Alas, the production never happened but I would have spent $28 for that.

I saw California Suite on stage with the original cast and liked three of the four plays a lot better there than in the movie. Actually, Simon changed the Bill Cosby-Richard Pryor one so much for the film that it really wasn't the same play, just the same theme. The one I liked in both venues was the one about the British actress who was in town for the Academy Awards.

I don't think a lot of people know that Simon wrote a sequel to that one. It was in his little-seen London Suite, which I saw on stage (though off-Broadway) in New York, and in it the character Maggie Smith played in the film (Tammy Grimes on Broadway) had turned into Angela Lansbury. She was starring as a detective on a hit U.S. television series — wink, wink — and her gay husband was off living with his new, male life partner.

It was the standout act of London Suite and I thought at the time that Simon must have been planning to write one more playlet about the couple — he left things somewhat dangling at the end of that second one — and then mount a play that would consist of all three chapters. If this was ever his intention, I'm sorry he never did it.

This week, Ken will be hosting The Goodbye Girl, Chapter Two and Only When I Laugh — three movies that all star the second Mrs. Neil Simon, Marsha Mason. The Goodbye Girl is easily the best of them, largely because of a volcanic performance by Richard Dreyfuss. He's great in it and it took me until I saw the failed Broadway musical adaptation of the movie to realize how great. Dreyfuss is very funny and adorable but he's abrasive enough that you can believe it takes the first two-thirds of the movie for Paula (Mason's character) to fall in love with him. On stage, Martin Short had the part and he was funny and adorable…but you couldn't comprehend why Paula (Bernadette Peters there) didn't fall for him halfway through his introductory song. So the show didn't work, at least for me or anybody.

Quick story: I've written here before about my actress friend Bridget Holloman. She had a tiny part in the movie of The Goodbye Girl. — one whole line, which wound up being cut, downgrading her to "extra" stature. You can see her in a couple of shots in a scene at an audition but that was it.

Her line was not even filmed and on the set, Mr. Simon apologized to her for that. She said to him, "I understand. It's just that I was in —" and here she listed for him some of the really awful movies and TV shows she'd been in and then she told him, "I was just looking forward to having a good line for a change."

She said Neil Simon was pleased by that…but not enough to reinstate the line or give her another one. That was not why she'd said it, by the way. She really meant it.

Chapter Two, I think was harmed by the miscasting of James Caan, who did not seem to get Simonesque dialogue. Judd Hirsch did when he did the role on stage and it was quite wonderful. I also felt that Marsha Mason was miscast in the film not because she couldn't be believable as a woman who marries a writer getting over the death of his first wife but because she was that. It was hard, at least for me, to get my mind off the fact that she was essentially playing herself, reliving personal torments slightly fictionalized for our entertainment. It was like the way you cringed in All That Jazz (or should have) when Ann Reinking played a woman who expressed her hurt to Bob Fosse Joe Gideon for not being faithful to her. Anyway, I thought Chapter Two was an okay movie made out of a better play.

Before I saw it, I also thought Mason was miscast in Only When I Laugh, which was Simon's screen adaptation of his play, The Gingerbread Lady. The lead role is that of a recovering, self-destructive alcoholic and the role was originated on the stage by Maureen Stapleton. I bet she was great in it. I could buy her as that kind of person in an instant. Marsha Mason struck me as just too lovely and too strong to play a person of such weakness…but I guess I forgot how good an actress she was. It was a pretty good movie which didn't get the attention it deserved. Glad to see it included here.

Note to Ken: You stated in your intro to The Odd Couple that when Walter Matthau and Art Carney originated the roles of Oscar and Felix on stage, they at some point traded roles. A leading authority on this kind of thing (i.e., me) believes this is an Urban Legend and not at all true. You also stated that you felt Klugman and Randall eclipsed Matthau and his co-star in the movie, Jack Lemmon, as those characters. Next time we lunch, I will tell you why I don't agree and our meal will probably devolve into an ugly fist fight and the busboys will have to separate us. I can tolerate people who hold differing political or religious viewpoints but not this.

Incidentally — and leaving the topics of Neil Simon, Ken Levine and Turner Classic Movies: In the piece I just linked to, I was writing about when Art Carney won the Oscar for his role in Harry and Tonto. I said…

No one expected that win, up against Nicholson in Chinatown, Pacino in Godfather II, Dustin Hoffman as Lenny, and Albert Finney in Murder on the Orient Express. When they called the name of Art Carney, he had a reaction I don't think I've ever seen from anyone else on the Academy Awards. It was kind of a stunned "Really?" not just at the name but at a sudden roar of approval from the audience. They liked that choice even if the recipient couldn't quite wrap his brain around it for a moment. You kind of got the feeling that he was used to being first runner-up in life and couldn't quite grasp that he'd climbed out of the "also starring…" pit. Still, being a pro, he rose to the occasion (and his feet) and did a little victory gesture that I can't describe but which seemed to say, "Hey, I did it." I don't recall what he said, other than that he was charmingly unprepared. But I remember that little gesture which said more than any acceptance speech by anyone I've seen before or since.

I couldn't show you that moment before but I can now. It's in the video below…and watching it made me think of one reason why the Academy Awards aren't as exciting as they once were. They used to often be about people we'd known for a long time. When Carney won in 1975, he was someone America had been watching for more than two decades. Back then, they went to people like him, John Wayne, Jack Lemmon, Marlon Brando…people with more of a sense of history. Now, they go to folks who, while they may have been around for a while, weren't really on most filmgoers' radar longer than about ten years…or maybe three or four outstanding films.

This is a generalization and there are plenty of exceptions but I don't think we often get that sense of someone finally being rewarded for a lifetime of exemplary work. Listen to how pleased this audience was to see the Oscar go to a longshot TV actor they first knew as Ed Norton. They won't be that happy if an Oscar goes this year to the actor named Ed Norton for Birdman…

I have just been announced (I knew months ago) as a guest for WonderCon, which takes place April 3-5 at the Anaheim Convention Center in…well, where else would the Anaheim Convention Center be? I will, as usual, be hosting panels and wandering around aimlessly and resisting all efforts to stick me behind a table to sit and sign stuff. I don't think I've been announced as a guest yet for Comic-Con International in San Diego in July but I'll bet I'll be doing those things there, too.

I'll also be appearing…nowhere else. I might get back to the New York Con in October — haven't decided yet — but I have no other convention plans for 2015. I do however host panels with the cats, raccoons and possums who come into my backyard in search of food every night. Just to keep in practice.

I put this up here on November 27, 2002. It's an interview with Phil Silvers, mostly about a dance number he did in the movie, Cover Girl. He referred to it as a six-minute number but it was actually a three-minute number. It probably just felt like a six-minute number…

One of the more thrilling afternoons of my life came about when I had a brunch-interview with the great Phil Silvers. It took place at Nate 'n Al's delicatessen in Beverly Hills in 1982, a little less than three years before he passed away.

Expecting it to last an hour, I only brought along about 90 minutes of tape, but Mr. Silvers was in a talkative mood. This was in spite of the lingering effects of a stroke that had thickened his speech and created odd holes in his memory. He could recall the name of the landlady at a hotel he'd lived in for two weeks while touring in burlesque, but not his current phone number. He could (and did) rattle off whole pages of dialogue from plays he'd done on Broadway decades earlier but had no memory whatsoever of The Chicken Chronicles, a movie he'd made five years before our chat.

My recorder ran out of tape long before Silvers ran out of anecdotes. Fortunately, I captured this remembrance about the "Make Way for Tomorrow" dance sequence in the 1944 film classic, Cover Girl. (I did not have to edit any questions from me out of what follows. Charmingly, Silvers did not require questions. He jumped from one topic to the next without prompting. And I just sat there and listened.)

Cover Girl was another Blinky role for me. I played the same character in every movie…Blinky. The guy who ran in in the next to last reel and said, "I got the stuff in the car." I never found out in all those movies what the stuff in the car was. Cover Girl was my first good movie. In this one, Blinky was named Genius but I was still Blinky. I was Blinky in every movie I made until I did Bilko. After that, I was Bilko in everything I did, which was fine. Bilko paid a lot better than Blinky.

We made Cover Girl at Columbia. At the time, Harry Cohn was God there. There was a different God at every studio. When you worked for M.G.M., Louis B. Mayer was God. At Columbia, it was Harry Cohn. I got along with him but no one else did. He liked me because I was a gambler. I gave him tips on horses. They always lost but he didn't blame me because to a gambler, a bad tip is better than no tip at all.

A man named Charles Vidor directed Cover Girl but from where I sat, Gene Kelly was the man in charge. He and his assistant Stanley Donen took over the choreography from the man they hired to do it. I don't remember his name but he choreographed the scenes with the chorus girls and then Kelly did everything else. Stanley Donen did some of it but it was mainly Gene. There was this song, "Make Way for Tomorrow." It was supposed to be a six minute dance down the street with Rita Hayworth and Gene dancing and leaping over trash cans and doing cartwheels. I watched them rehearse it for three days and I thought, "Thank God I don't have to do that."

The fourth day, Gene came over to me and said, "I think it would strengthen the story if you were in the number." There was a drunk who had a tiny part in it. I think it was Jack Norton, who was the drunk in any movie that had a drunk in it. I thought Gene meant I'd do a little bit like that in the number so I said, "Yes, sure, I'll do whatever you want." The next thing I know, Gene and Stanley had redesigned the whole number for three people and I was one of those three people.

He did not design it for a non-dancer, which is what I was. It was designed for Gene and Rita, who were the two best dancers in the business. I had to come up to their standard. They danced up and down stairs. I had to dance up and down stairs. They leaped over boxes. I had to leap over boxes. All the time, I'm thinking, "I'm dancing next to Gene Kelly, doing the same steps. Everybody's going to be comparing us. If we're out of step, no one's going to assume Gene's the one who's wrong. Gene was still a newcomer on screen but everyone knew he was the best dancer to come along.

It was rough. They were going to shoot it in pieces but Gene insisted we rehearse it straight through, start to end. I don't remember how long it took to learn. Rita, I think, required four weeks. It must have been longer with me but I did it. Whatever Gene and Rita did, I did, and I did it as well as they did. And Gene was right. It did strengthen the story. It was a surprise for me to be in that number and to dance it like that. When we were done shooting, I ached all over. Every muscle in my body hurt. But I felt like I could do anything.

In later years, every time I had something to do in a film or a TV show that I thought I couldn't do, I thought back to that number. And I said to myself, "If you can do that, you can do anything."

Phil Silvers was, indeed, a man who could do anything. Later, after the tape recorder was no longer running, he lamented the physical problems from his stroke and said, "If I could do that number in Cover Girl, I ought to be able to walk across the street on my own, don't you think?"

Geez, Stuffy Singer has had an amazing career. Stu Shostak could fill most of tomorrow's Stu's Show just by having Stuffy list all the things he's done since he started out as a child star, commencing at age six. Yes, at an age where most of us are still learning to wave bye-bye, he was on one of the earliest TV shows. He later had regular roles on two popular situation comedies, Beulah and the 1957 version of Blondie. That's in addition to dozens of guest appearances on other TV shows and his work in radio…and eventually, he left show business and went on to become an award-winning tennis player. Oughta be quite an interview.

Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at the Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there. Webcasts start at 4 PM Pacific Time, 7 PM Eastern and other times in other climes. They run a minimum of two hours and sometimes go way longer. Shortly after a show's over, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a measly 99 cents each and you can get four shows for the price of three. Or eight for the price of six. Or twelve for the price of nine. Or all of them for three-fourths the price of all of them. The more you buy, the more you save.

Here's a news story about Ray Bradbury's former home being torn down.

I absolutely understand the sense of loss people have over something like this. I have very happy memories of that building and of its owner but I don't offhand see any practical scenario to preserving it. Ray's family has the right to unload it and stop taking care of it and to get the selling price, which the story says was $1.76 million. If the purchasers instead of tearing it down were to move in and remodel it to suit themselves, it would still become their house and the connection to Ray would still be very faint. I can't see anyone wanting to tour it…or if people did, for the owners to be burdened by that.

Some would say it should be preserved…but who would preserve it and for what purpose? Ray's artifacts and papers and memorabilia should be preserved and perhaps exhibited but that's not what's being torn down here. I saw someone on one forum suggest it should be a museum. I can imagine someone — I dunno who — raising the funds to establish a Ray Bradbury Museum. I'd even kick in for that but if there was to be such a place, there are much, much better locations for it…like a building designed to be a museum or at least a public facility. That house is in a crowded residential area with, as I recall, terrible parking without having a museum there.

I'm trying to not to be callous here. I just don't see how else this story could have ended.

We roll the clock back to 12/31/04 and what I posted that day to tell this tale of great import…

Around 1970, when I got into the comic book business, the consensus was that there wouldn't be a comic book business for long…and not because of me. The traditional method of distribution — comics sold on a returnable basis to newsstands around the country — was failing, or at least it was failing comic books. The biggest distributor, Independent News, was making large sums off more expensive, adult publications like Playboy and Penthouse, and some there suggested that newsracks were no longer a place for kids or low-priced periodicals. Since comic books were low-priced and largely for kids, this was a pretty ominous suggestion, especially when you considered that Independent News not only distributed DC Comics but was a part of the same company. In other words, DC's wares were being sold by an outfit that no longer believed there was a future in selling comic books. With that attitude, there couldn't be much of one.

The "returnable" part was what was really hurting comics. Marvel would print 500,000 copies of an issue of Spider-Man and would get paid only for those that actually sold. So if the racks were crowded (or the distributor trucks filled with an extra-thick issue of Playboy that week), 50,000 might not make it to the racks at all. Many more copies would get damaged and returned with all the unsold copies for credit. 300,000 might actually be sold and the rest would get pulped…obviously, not the most efficient way to do business. In the past, the ratio had not been that bad, and a publisher could make a tidy profit…but by the seventies, the numbers were closing in on the comic book industry.

To the rescue came not Superman or Batman but a Brooklyn school teacher named Phil Seuling. Phil ran the big comic conventions in New York for years so he knew the fan market and its buying power. Around 1973, he began proposing to DC and Marvel that he sell their comics in a different manner, by-passing traditional newsstands and getting them directly to comic book dealers and shops. He would pay slightly less per copy to the publisher but he'd be buying the comics on a non-returnable basis, so a sale would be a sale; no printing five copies to sell three.

At first, publishers rebuffed his proposal. The "direct market," as it would come to be called, did not seem lucrative enough to warrant the attention, to say nothing of how it might further destroy the old method. But before long, it became apparent that the old method was being destroyed, with or without selling books the Seuling way, so DC, Marvel and other companies tried it. Within a year, around 25% of all comic books were being sold via "direct" distribution, through Seuling's company and about a dozen others, with 75% still on conventional newsstands. Within ten years, those percentages were reversed. Today, the "direct market" is the primary market…though Phil, sadly, did not live to reap the full benefits of his idea. He died in 1984 at the age of 50.

That's Phil in the above photo, second from the left, holding a stack of comic books. The man at the far left is talk show host Mike Douglas, and this is a still from his popular afternoon show, air date July 28, 1977.

Seuling was a guest on that episode to discuss comic book collecting and conventions and such. He was asked by the producers to bring along "a superhero" to surprise the audience…and Mike Douglas. They apparently expected Phil to find a guy in a Batman costume or something, but Phil had a better idea.

The character of Red Sonja was then big in Marvel Comics. Developed by editor-writer Roy Thomas from a brief appearance in one of Robert E. Howard's stories, she was one of the sexier characters around. Some of that was due to the way Roy wrote her and some to the way she was depicted by her illustrators…most notably, Frank Thorne. But a lot of it was because she began turning up at comic book and science-fiction conventions…in the flesh. There were many young women who seized on the inspiration to fashion an appropriate costume and to parade about the aisles and masquerades. None of them drew more stares or attention than Wendy Pini.

Today, Wendy is best known as the talented artist and co-creator (with her husband, Richard) of the Elfquest series. Millions of copies have been sold of Elfquest graphic novels, prose novels, comic books, calendars, art folios and other items from that wonderful fantasy world…but in '77, Elfquest was just beginning. To most comic fans, Wendy was that lovely lady who dressed up as Red Sonja at conventions, often performing a little show with artist Frank Thorne.

So when Phil Seuling was invited to appear on The Mike Douglas Show and asked to bring along his own superhero, he brought Wendy. Neither Mr. Douglas nor his co-host, Jamie Farr, saw her before she burst onto the stage at the close of the segment. (Douglas was concerned that her costume — or lack of one — might offend the show's female viewers. There's no report on what Farr thought, but he probably wished he had an outfit like that.)

That's really all there is to this story. I wanted to run the photo because it's so wonderful, and because it gives me the chance to tell you about Phil. And I also wanted to mention that, much to Wendy's amazement, I have actually located a tape of that episode of The Mike Douglas Show for her. I haven't yet discussed it with the programming folks at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, but I'll bet we can find some event at the 2005 convention where we can show that segment to everyone who wants to see it. It's a great moment.

P.S. Since I posted this, several folks (including Gary Sassaman and Steve Thompson) have pointed out to me that 1977 was the year that Phil Seuling's big New York comic book convention could not find hotel space in New York, so it moved to Philadelphia. Philadelphia was where Mike Douglas taped his show.

• Mike Huckabee condemns Obamas letting daughters listen to Beyoncé; says they should be out getting pregnant like Sarah Palin's kid.

One of my three-or-so favorite current TV shows returns to the air cable on February 8…

Many messages sent to me in the last few days have bounced back to the sender as undeliverable. I think I know what the problem is but it may take a few days to fix it. In the meantime, I've set up an alternate e-mail address on this page. It's temporary but it should work until the problem is solved. Sorry about this.