Monthly Archives: June 2015

• Scott Walker says he might re-invade Iraq. That's great because the first time worked so well but didn't cost quite enough lives or money.

In 1970, my then-partner Steve Sherman and I spent a few days up at the offices of Marvel Comics, which were then on Madison Avenue in New York City. A few minutes ago, I was browsing Ye Olde Internet and I came upon these photos that were taken in that office in 1970 and I thought, "Gee, the office looks just like it did when Steve and I were there. Even some of the same things are pinned up on the walls. Those must have been taken only a few months before or after we were there."

Then I noticed the photos were taken by Steve Sherman. No wonder everything looked just like it did when we were there.

Quick funny story. As you may be able to tell, most of those who worked in the office then were in little cubicles, surrounded by walls which did not reach all the way to the top. These photos were taken on a Tuesday or Thursday. Stan Lee was the guy in charge but Stan only came in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays so "The Boss" was not there that day.

Some in the office were annoyed at a rule that Stan had just laid down. The offices were a fun place with a lot of joking about and inter-office pranks. Many of the artists working there were known to dash off and pin-up insulting cartoons about each other and sometimes, these cartoons could get a bit raunchy. John Romita, whose duties then included drawing covers for some romance comics, had drawn alternate versions of a couple of those covers in which the posing and dialogue was exactly the same but the women were nude. Some of the dialogue took on different meanings when that change was made.

Stan had ordered all this stuff off the walls since once in a while, children were brought in to tour the office. The folks who worked there seemed to feel that was an unfair decree on his part. Only a few drawings were naughty and those were easily hidden when kids came by. The staff felt that what Stan was really trying to get rid of were the cartoons kidding each other. Since he was the head guy, an awful lot of them were about him.

Anyway, since Stan was out that day, a new round of cartoons about him went up, depicting him as a bad sport. Marie Severin, who was appallingly good at caricatures, drew one of Stan ordering all the cartoons off the walls, especially the ones that made fun of his toupee, which was then about as big a secret in comics as the fact that Clark Kent was Superman. In the drawing Marie did, Stan was yelling, "No one knows about my hairpiece!" and the hairpiece had a huge price tag hanging off it and everyone else on the staff was laughing and yelling at him, "You've got it on backwards!"

Also, some naughty drawings were pinned up. The plan was that at the end of the day, all of this would be taken down to comply with Stan's order. None of it would be there when he came in to work the next day.

Suddenly though, they heard Stan's voice! It was coming over the top of the room dividers near the front. He'd just come in!

Everyone panicked, rushing to rip down drawings that were naughty or about Stan. They got them all down just as he came around the corner —

— and it wasn't Stan. It was his brother Larry. Larry Lieber, who wrote and drew for Marvel, sounded just like Stan when he spoke loud enough. There was a burst of relieved laughter and John Verpoorten, who was the production manager, suggested this was a sign from God; that they'd gotten a reprieve and shouldn't risk putting the drawings back up.

Marie Severin took about a dozen of her Stan-mocking cartoons and slipped them into a manila envelope to take home. Then she turned to me and said, "You just witnessed the end of an era. Cartoons on the walls were where most of us did our best work." Of course, the tradition resumed a few weeks or months later.

I'm really glad Steve took all those photos of the office but I wish he'd taken the inside ones about a half hour earlier…when the cartoons were still up.

Merrill Markoe explains "College Is Not the Best Four Years of Your Life." Her days in college could not have been less like my days in college, which were a little after hers and only lasted two years before I quit.

Amazing moments on the baseball field…

And since I'm in an Equal Time mood today, here's Piers Morgan giving his side of the incident that led to the tweet from John Cleese I quoted earlier. If there's ever a contest to see which of these two men — Cleese or Morgan — less deserves the label of "whining pub bore," I'm betting all I own on the Dead Parrot Guy.

In fairness to Justice Scalia — and despite the fact that I don't think he's usually fair to others — I should clarify/correct something. There's no record of him actually saying that it was inarguable that Henry Lee "Buddy" McCollum was guilty. He presumed McCollum was guilty when he brought him up but so did Justice Blackmun, who was arguing against the Death Penalty for McCollum in that case.

Blackmun actually had two arguments and neither one was that McCollum hadn't done what they said he'd done. One was, and I quote —

Buddy McCollum is mentally retarded. He has an IQ between 60 and 69 and the mental age of a 9-year old. He reads on a second grade level. This factor alone persuades me that the death penalty in his case is unconstitutional.

The other argument was that McCollum's three convicted cohorts in the rape/murder were not sentenced to death; just the guy with the mental age of a 9-year old. Scalia cited the brutal crime to say that death-by-lethal injection seemed "enviable" compared to the crime that had been committed. (Apparently in Scalia's world, the way in which we execute murderers doesn't have to be humane. It just has to not be as bad as what they did to their victims.)

Elsewhere though, Scalia has been a firm believer that innocent people are never put to death by our government. In 2006, he wrote, "If such an event [an innocent person's execution] had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby."

The flaw in that argument, I've always thought, is two-fold. One is that once someone is put to death, it is rare that their innocence is ever investigated. The state that executed them sure doesn't want to see that proven and often puts great obstacles in the way of those who try to exonerate the executed. And once the person's dead, there's a lot less reason for anyone to push for exoneration.

The second flaw is that it has been shouted — maybe not from rooftops but in the press. Here are ten instances, most of which were established before Scalia's "rooftops" statement in 2006.

The more than 150 people who were sentenced to Death Row but exonerated before execution is also a pretty strong argument that we do execute the innocent. If McCollum had been executed back when Scalia said his lethal injection would be "enviable," his innocence would probably have never been established. But no, Scalia did not say McCollum's guilt was inarguable. He said the guilt of everyone who'd been executed was inarguable.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once defended the Death Penalty by pointing to a certain convicted killer whose guilt was inarguable and whose crime was about as horrible as any ever committed in this country. That man, who he said clearly deserved to die, was Henry Lee McCollum

Henry Lee McCollum has been pardoned after spending three decades in prison. Turns out he was innocent.

Jeff Keller wrote to ask…

What's the deal with these Mentalist reruns in Letterman's old time slot? Late night isn't the place for that kind of thing and I'm worried that that lead-in will kill off James Corden's show, which I'm beginning to like a lot. Why didn't they move Corden up to 11:35 until Colbert is ready? My second choice would have been to air Letterman reruns and my third choice would have been to have guest hosts like they did to fill in between Craig Ferguson and Corden. Why aren't they doing any of that?

Well, first off, it's not just The Mentalist going into that time slot. There will also be Big Brother reruns and some original programming at that hour before Dr. Colbert takes up residence. Secondly, if you leave aside Letterman's last few weeks when his ratings were way up due to the big Grand Finale, Mentalist reruns are drawing about the same numbers he did…with a show that cost a lot more to put on.

Years ago, a fellow I knew in programming told me a theory he had. He was not involved in programming late night but if he'd ever gotten in there — this was at ABC — he planned to push to forget about talk shows and put on hour dramas instead. I'll try to explain his working premise here…

Late night is all about keeping people from going to bed. A lot of the "battle" between Jay and Dave was not about who could get more people to tune in at 11:35. It was who could get those viewers to stick around longer. During the time Dave was beating Jay, Jay was often getting more viewers from 11:35 to 11:50 (i.e., the monologue) and then Dave would dominate the next 45 minutes as Jay's audience went to bed or switched to something else, including Dave. When Jay overtook Dave, a lot of that was because Jay's viewers were just sticking around longer.

On a late night talk show, every time you conclude a segment, a chunk of your viewing audience turns in for the night. You might turn off a talk show halfway through because you have no interest in the second guest…and a pretty hefty portion of those watching Jay or Dave did that. On the other hand, if you watch a detective show halfway through, you're less likely to turn it off. It's unsatisfying to not find out whodunnit or to see the bank robbers get caught. Folks can say, "Let's watch the first part of Jimmy Fallon before we go to sleep." They're not as likely to say, "Let's watch the first part of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."

At least, that was his theory…and as some of you remember it was tried, pre-Letterman, at CBS. They scheduled cop show reruns under the blanket title of Crime Time After Prime Time. It wasn't a total failure but getting a hit talk show in there looked like a better use of the time. (My friend's answer was that CBS ran the wrong cop shows there — ones selected for their cheapness than their quality. "Talk shows fail when they aren't any good either," he noted.)

That friend is no longer in programming but the ratings the last week or so for The Mentalist would suggest that his theory is not wholly without merit. That will not stop The Coming of Colbert but if as some predict America just tires of all talk shows some day, we might see more of this, at least at 11:35. I have a hunch people would not commit at 12:35 to watching an hour show you kinda have to see through to the end. Then again, as DVR usage becomes more commonplace, the actual times that shows air become increasingly less significant.

(I would guess that if you put a show like that on at 12:35, most people would simply not start watching because they wouldn't want to commit to staying up until 1:35, whereas they can start watching a talk show at that hour and bail when they get sleepy. Originally, back in the Steve Allen days, that was the reason for putting talk shows at 11:30 but the country now stays up later than it used to. That's why TV stations no longer sign off for the night.)

I wouldn't worry about Corden. He's probably getting a big Get Out of Jail Free card right now. If his ratings were to tank — and they haven't yet — CBS would not blame him for being unable to hold an atypical lead-in. They'd just say, "Well, he's not compatible with the shows we have on now. Let's wait and see how he does after Colbert." Once the new Late Show debuts and goes through a few months to find its levels and get the bugs out, that's when Corden will face his real test.

A show in his slot is judged mainly by how well it maintains the viewing levels of the last fifteen minutes of the show before it. He's not expected to hold all of it but trouble is afoot if he loses most of it. If Colbert's show is a hit and Corden keeps a reasonable portion of the viewership he inherits each night, he'll be fine. Personally, I think that's the most likely outcome of the change. If Colbert flops — which I sure don't expect — then poor ratings for Corden will be the fault of his lead-in, not him. So he's in a pretty good position.

Why they didn't put on Letterman reruns? My understanding is that Dave didn't want that. He wanted his end to be clean…and he owns those shows.

Why didn't they move Corden up to 11:35 for the interim? Well, this is speculation but maybe Colbert didn't want that. What if James did great at 11:35 and then Stephen came on and didn't do as well? It may also be that CBS views Corden as long-range work-in-progress and wanted to keep him in the Minor League (so to speak) until he's more ready for the Big Time.

Why didn't they have several months of guest hosts? Probably because it would have meant assembling an entire staff and production crew and finding a studio and building a set. The guest hosts who followed Ferguson used his stage, his set, his crew, etc. Letterman's set-up though had to be dismantled right away to begin prepping for Colbert so that was not an option. Filling with guest hosts would have been a lot more expensive than running The Mentalist and whatever else they'll have on there. And it just may be that someone at CBS wanted to audition a return to late-night hour dramas just in case Colbert doesn't beat any Jimmies.

John Cleese on Twitter…

Jonathan Chait reports the demise of yet another "fact" that Global Warming deniers have used to delay doing anything about Global Warming. Any day now they'll be down to claiming that the "science is still not settled" because there's a middle school Chemistry teacher in Biloxi who hasn't made up his mind.

Last time I mentioned Climate Change, I got a couple of e-mails from people who said, approximately, "Don't be ridiculous. It is the height of foolish arrogance for Man to think that he can change the weather!" I hope that's not so but I do know that if our weather's going to get more extreme, we should build levees and better drainage conduits and fix bridges and roads and do all sorts of things to prepare. That, Man can certainly do.

• G.O.P. voters are getting more individual attention these days. Soon, there will be one candidate for each of them.

• More silly comments from Mike Huckabee about sex changes. This man needs a species change…to human.

One of my favorite movies was made from one of my favorite musicals and they're both 1776. As you may be aware though, the movie has had a checkered and beleaguered history of being trimmed.  For its original release, much material was hacked out including what was arguably the most important song.

Once upon a time, the deleted material was deemed irrevocably lost. Then someone found degraded copies of some of the footage and we had a home video release using much of that. Then someone found original, non-degraded copies of some footage and…well, there have been many versions available. We now appear to have a "definitive," near-perfect restoration.

Interested in the numbers? The original theatrical release ran 142 minutes. The new Blu-ray contains two different versions — a "Director's Cut" that runs 165 and an even longer cut that runs 168. I have not compared them but film scholars are all saying the longest version is the one to watch. They also seem to be unanimously impressed by the quality of the video and the color correcting that has been done on it, plus there are also new commentary tracks, deleted and alternate scenes, screen tests and other supplemental goodies.

Maddeningly, the Amazon listing for this new release gives 142 minutes as the running time. Don't believe that but do use that link to buy it and watch it. Or wait 'til a month from today and watch it on an appropriate day. It's a great movie and it deserves to be seen at its best.

There's a new one of these "challenge" things that's a bit saner than dumping a tub of ice water on yourself. It's to show support for Veterans by doing twenty push-ups. Hey, I could do that. I mean, I did it when I was 17 and like climbing Mount Everest — which I'll also get around to doing one of these days — once you prove you can do it, you never have to prove it again. Here's Jon Stewart rising to the challenge…

You'll notice that one of the people he calls out is John Oliver. Here's Mr. Oliver taking on the dare. I don't want to cast aspersions on the man but I have the odd feeling he cheated a bit…

A big theme of the political posts on this blog is "Follow the money" — and oddly enough, it's a point that even the rightest of right-wing readers here seem to agree with. We all know Ben Carson has no chance of being president. He probably has no chance of (and no interest in) holding any elective office. Even my Conservative friends all seem to agree that much if not most of what he says that makes headlines is nonsense.

So why does he say these things? Because he's getting very rich saying them. There may be other reasons but for most people in this country, that would be reason enough.