Monthly Archives: August 2015

A few months ago, I purchased a copy of The Annotated Marx Brothers: A Filmgoer's Guide to In-Jokes, Obscure References and Sly Details by Matthew Coniam. It's an in-depth look at the brothers' films telling you every little detail you could possibly want to know about the making of the movies and, more significantly, all the cultural references and little mentions that are now historically obscure. Like in A Night at the Opera, there's an exchange that goes…

GROUCHO: Don't you know what duplicates are?

CHICO: Sure! Those five kids up in Canada!

If things like that mystify you — if you didn't know it was a reference to the Dionne Quintuplets born in Ontario in 1934 — then you need this book. It puts a lot of what's in those films into proper historical context and clues you in as to what some of the obscure lines mean.

It's one of those "must-get" items for anyone interested in Groucho, Harpo, Chico and even — and yes, some people are interested in him — Zeppo. When I can read a book about the Marx Brothers and learn stuff, that's got to be a great book.

I meant to tell you this and to post a link to order when I first got it and started reading but I somehow never got around to that. Thanks to Marx Fan extraordinaire Bob Gassel (who assisted with some research, I believe) for reminding me I wanted to remind you that you want this.

From the 1970 Academy Awards telecast: Fred Astaire and Bob Hope present two Oscars for documentaries and in between them, Fred (age 71 then) does some fancy hoofing. Skip the envelope-opening and watch Fred dance like Fred Astaire…

Matt Taibbi thinks Donald Trump just stopped being funny. I never thought Donald Trump was particularly funny but I thought (and still think) a lot of this country finds him entertaining. Car chases aren't funny either but most of us watch them.

I continue to think that very little of what happens in current political news has much to do with who will be the Republican nominee or the next President of the United States except that as we go along, certain people become a little more or less likely than others. For instance, Chris Christie is more likely than Lindsey Graham. Then again, the Geico gecko is more likely than Lindsey Graham — and that gecko probably wasn't even born in this country.

Is Trump inevitable? Last I heard, Nate Silver was still pegging the guy's chances at the nomination as between two and four percent. Silver, who looks at polling not at domination of news cycles, would have to up that number a lot before I'd think Trump was possible.

One thing that may impact the election is the new dynamic of the G.O.P. as increasingly hostile to illegal immigrants. Weren't Republican leaders saying just a few months ago that the party had to do a better job of attracting racial minorities and women voters? The assaults on Planned Parenthood are probably not winning over a lot of ladies, either.

I don't know where all this talk about "anchor babies" is going except that a lot of people out there seem to think that if two illegal aliens have a baby in this country, mother and father automatically become American citizens. I wish someone they'd trust would explain to them that is not so. An illegal couple might become less likely to be deported because of the kid but the parents don't instantly get citizenship. The child, when he or she reaches the age of 21 can sponsor them for that but even after that, it takes a long, long time to qualify.

I do know that the current yelling is not going to result in a constitutional amendment to rescind the 14th and do away with Birthright Citizenship. We have an ongoing position of this blog: Constitutional amendments do not happen in this country unless at least 80% of the nation is in agreement on the issue. It pretty much has to be a proposal that has no organized opposition.

Something like 90% of the time when someone calls for one, they don't even bother to take the first step to make it happen. The other 10%, they get it introduced just so they can say they tried, and it gets quickly defeated and that's the end of it. We will never see an amendment passed that outlaws abortion or Gay Marriage or overturns Citizens United or institutes a mandatory death penalty for the making of cole slaw or any of those. My cole slaw one is about as likely as any of the others.

Calling for a constitutional amendment is apparently great for fund-raising. Also in this country, a lot of voters don't want their candidates to ever admit a cause is lost so they cheer his or her determination to fight, fight, fight. Instead of admitting that you've lost on an issue like Gay Marriage, you pledge to fight for a constitutional amendment that overturns the Supreme Court or whatever. You don't actually do anything but make that pledge and maybe introduce a bill that is quickly shot down but it still impresses people that you said you'd fight for it. I don't get why.

Music from Star Wars as performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra…

Cedric Hohnstadt has been a freelance illustrator for almost twenty years. After reading my tips about pricing your work, he wrote in to say…

I still dislike talking money with clients, but it's a necessary evil and there's no avoiding it, so a few years ago I decided might as well educate myself and try to make the best of it. For whatever it's worth here's a few pricing tips that, for the most part, have kept me from underselling myself:

1. You should lose about 1/3 of the jobs that come your way because your prices are just too high. If you rarely or never get push back on your pricing, you aren't charging enough.

2. Never give a price off the top of your head. It will almost always wind up being too low or too high. Instead, just tell them you need a few minutes to run some numbers and then you'll call them back. That will take the pressure off and give you time to think it through properly. A good client should have absolutely no problem with this.

3. Sometimes it's OK to lower your price if the client asks, but don't do it "just because." It can make you look desperate and unprofessional, or worse, greedy and dishonest (as if your pricing is purely arbitrary and you just want to fleece your client for as much as you can). Instead, offer them some sort of trade off. Maybe the client gets less of something (in my case fewer sketches; simpler artwork; less rights to the work; etc.) or you get more of something (better payment terms; longer deadline; more samples of the final product; an in-kind trade; etc.) Whatever you trade off doesn't necessarily have to have the same monetary value as the discount, but that's not really the point. The idea is to show the client you want to help them and be flexible while, at the same time, not undermining the value of your work.

Thanks, Cedric. To that last point: One of the tricks that good agents know how to do is how to back off a firm price without admitting that they're backing off a firm price. They say, "You will pay my client $5000 or he won't do it. He has a firm, established price for this kind of thing and there's no way in hell he will accept a nickel less. If you were holding his grandmother hostage and threatening to kill her, he would not do it for less than five thousand dollars!"

Sometimes, that kind of demand yields the five thousand dollars. Sometimes, it doesn't. When it doesn't, the client might decide, "Well, four thousand is still good money for this and I'd still like to do it. Can you find some way to agree to that?" That's when the agent has to go back and say…

"You know, my client likes you and he wants to work with you and he believes in your project. Now, he wouldn't do this for anyone else but if you'll send him some free samples of your product, he'll knock a thousand dollars off his price just this once. I advised him not to do this and I"ve never known him to do it for anyone else…but he really likes you."

That way, the client can get the job and the agent can still say, "He is a firm, established price of five thousand." The trick is not to make things precedential and to find an excuse for budging off that firm price just this once. Some people do that all the time and their price remains firm even though they never actually get it.

My pal James H. Burns has a fun article online about going to the beach as a kid. One of these days, I'll have to write my own article about going to the beach when I was a kid. SPOILER ALERT: I hated it. So read his.

A brief moment with Johnny…

During the 1968 presidential election, ABC News "sweetened" (to some, "soured") its convention coverage with a series of short televised debates between the right-wing William F. Buckley and the left-wing Gore Vidal. The spots degenerated into a lot of angry name-calling and as a new documentary reportedly argues, began the trend of political wrestling matches on TV. There are probably antecedents — like David Susskind's shows or Joe Pyne's — which one could argue got there first but the Buckley-Vidal match-up did clearly pre-date a lot of what we endure today.

In this article, Geoffrey Kabaservice speaks of the documentary, Best of Enemies (which I am eager to see) and gives much of the backstory. I recall watching those arguments and thinking that much of America was probably detesting both men and hoping somehow they both would lose.

Kabaservice endorses the documentary's view that Buckley and Vidal had much in common, both being men born into privilege and exceedingly well-educated and who had failed in attempts to be elected to office, etc. Back then, they both also struck me as brilliant men who at least appeared to have never really worked one day, at least in the way that most Americans work, and who were quite out of touch with ordinary lives.

They also both did something that I did back then, though with vastly less success. I stopped doing it when a wise teacher of mine called me on it one day. He said, "Mark, you seem to know an awful lot of big words which most people don't know, and that's admirable in many ways. But you don't use them to communicate. You use them to try and not communicate; to put others on the defensive and at a disadvantage in a discussion."

I started to argue the point and he said, "We can have this argument but I'll tell you what will indicate that you've lost: When you employ a word that you think I don't know so that I won't be able to respond. It's a dirty way to try and win an argument. If you want to win a discussion fairly, don't employ words intended to derail communication."

I decided at that moment he was right and I did not accuse him of being a cacodoxical cullion or whatever would have come to mind. Thereafter, I tried to dial back the polysyllabic obfuscation in my palaver. (With some amusement, I note that Mr. Kabaservice starts his article by writing, "Context matters in the coruscating new documentary, 'Best of Enemies.'" Like 99.7% of you, I didn't know what "coruscating" meant, either. Turns out it means flashing or sparkling.

Anyway, I guardedly admired Buckley and Vidal on an individual basis and thought their one-on-one addressed no actual issues and made both look bad. If indeed the case can be made that it inspired a lot of the mud-wrestling that now passes for political discussion on TV, I'll think even less of it.

Monday evenings in 1932 and 1933, an NBC radio program called Five Star Theater presented episodes of a comedy series called Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel starring Groucho as the slippery attorney Waldorf T. Flywheel and Chico Marx as his assistant, Emanuel Ravelli. Years later in The Big Store, Groucho would play the equally-slippery detective Wolf J. Flywheel and Chico had already used the name Emanuel Ravelli in Animal Crackers.

When I first became involved in Marx Brothers fandom and history, all traces of these shows had disappeared off the face of the planet but for a few reviews and magazine articles about them. Eventually, the audio surfaced for pieces of a few episodes and one complete one. You can click below and hear the one complete one…

In 1988, someone found almost all of the scripts (25 out of 26) in The Library of Congress. They were published in book form and a number of folks recorded new re-creations with faux Grouchos and Chicos. The most ambitious of these projects was done in the early nineties for BBC Radio.

They took some liberties with the material, sometimes combining two or more of the original scripts to make one episode, sometimes interpolating songs. In one, their Groucho sings "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" which the real one sang in the 1939 movie At the Circus. The tune probably hadn't even been written when Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel was originally airing.

Still, the shows are entertaining and every so often, the BBC puts them up on their website for our listening pleasure. "Every so often" includes now. For the next 29 days, you can listen to the first episode at this link and others will be available there in the future. Don't thank me. Thank Chris Collins, who let me know this one was back up.

I smiled a lot yesterday to see all the folks on the 'net showing their love for the late Yvonne Craig. The web was full of remembrances and photos — including an awful lot of photos of other women in Batgirl suits who were misidentified as Yvonne. Most of all, there were sweet stories about meeting her and a few folks sent theirs to me. Here's Steve Haynie's…

Yvonne Craig's first convention appearance was at the 1988 Magnum Opus Con in Columbus, GA. She was going to give away autographed photos, but a few of us talked her out of that by pointing out that other guests supported themselves by selling photos. We warned her about the autograph dealers that would swoop in to take advantage of her generosity. She gave in with, "OK, then. How about fifty cents?" We told her no again. I took off for a few minutes, and when I came back she agreed to go as high as two dollars apiece. All the money was donated to a charity the local Star Fleet chapter worked with.

I saw her a few more times over the years at conventions. She was always nice. Al Bigley had his baby boy at a convention, and over the years Yvonne Craig kept up with how the little guy was growing up. One of the best ways to sum up how she felt about fans came from a comic book dealer I knew. He said she was at a show where there were sports stars who came in to sign for a very brief time and left. Yvonne Craig was married to a successful businessman, and she did well as a real estate agent. She did not need to be there to make money, but she spent the entire day signing and meeting fans when she could have just limited herself to a short time like the sports stars did. Yvonne Craig enjoyed meeting fans.

By the way, Alan Napier lived in the same condominiums as Yvonne Craig, and they would get together weekly until his death.

Alan Napier, just to remind you all, was the gent who played Alfred the Butler on the Batman TV show. And I received this from Gene Stuart…

I am not one to write fan mail but I really felt compelled to thank you for your homage to Yvonne Craig. It was heartfelt and sweet and very authentic, and there is no better way to honor someone who is no longer with us. It must have been great actually getting to meet her. Being gay, I can only appreciate the teenage crush by analogy. But as the owner of 25,000 comics, I completely understand the fanboy part of the crush.

In fact, in those days I read letters pages just as religiously as the comics. I am sure I read your letter and I would have completely disagreed with you [although apparently most of fandom agreed with you — about nine years after that comic came out I was told by someone at DC comics that those Batman-Elongated Man cross-overs were the lowest selling issues of Detective Comics in each of the years they came out and that's why there were only two of them].

Anyway, I was a big television fan as well as a comic fan. What came through in your story on Ms. Craig was a bit of that unique and special relationship that people have with folks they see on television, especially recurring roles on weekly television. It was truer in the sixties then today, before you had telephones, tablets and computer screens to watch television on at your convenience. If you weren't available at that time and place [same bat-time, same bat-channel] you were just out of luck until summer rerun season. Your references to that poor guy having his comic passed around out his control were priceless. I know that feeling all too well.

So thank you very much for sharing your stroll down memory lane and giving us a personal glimpse of a talented lady.

And lastly, here's one from Alicia C., who wrote to say…

Thank you for making a very important point about Yvonne Craig. Most of the tributes I read just focused on how physically attractive she was and of course no one had to make that point. It's obvious in every photo of her. But I was pleased to read that she was so nice to her fans and that she was so aware of the effect she had on some of them. That last line told me she was no dummy and the whole piece made me realize that just because she was no longer on TV after the Batman show went off, she remained a star forever.

Exactly. I don't think anyone who ever loved her on TV and then got to meet her at a convention ever came away disappointed. That does happen with some celebrities. The wonderfulness they convey on screen is diminished or even contradicted by what they display in person, especially years later. That was not the case with Ms. Craig or for that matter, Julie Newmar. I've gotten to know Julie somewhat better since then and I no longer think of her just as a symbol of glamour. I think of her as glamour plus an awful lot of brains and compassion.

Changing the subject only slightly: It surprises me that some people in this day and age don't seem to understand what a "crush" is or was. Gene (above) gets it but a couple of folks who commented on my piece seem to think it's a euphemism for serious, activist lusting after someone's body and it isn't…or wasn't. If that had been how my friends and I felt about Yvonne Craig (or others on screen or in centerfolds), I wouldn't have used such a passive, innocent word.

I can understand the confusion. Guys at age 15 — where I was when Ms. Craig was first on my radar — can get pretty…well, I'm trying to think of a nicer word than "horny." If you have one, fill it in for me, please. Many of them do some pretty awkward, even destructive things due to peer and/or hormonal pressure but not every interaction is fueled by those motivators. You can desperately want to be near certain members of the opposite sex or even your own, but there's also such a thing as admiring from afar…especially when a person you find so interesting is and is likely to remain unattainable.

True, when I was that age, I was often thinking about carnal knowledge…but with ladies in my class, and I mean "class" as a function of both location and caste. It always seemed to be the height of self-punishment (not to be confused with self-abuse) to fantasize about women I would never meet, let alone know intimately. At that age, you have enough probable disappointments in life that you don't need to set yourself up for certain ones. It's pretty much the same reason I always wanted to be a professional writer as opposed to, say, President of the United States or The First Man on Mars or something. Set your dreams high but don't make them wholly unreachable.

A crush — the kind I had on many unmeetable women in my teens — was just an interest, just a desire to see more of them even if it was only on TV. It was kind of a way of defining for myself what I thought was attractive…like window-shopping the new 2015 Ferrari 458 Speciale when one is destined to forever be a couple hundred grand shy of the purchase price.

I didn't expect to ever be in the same room as Yvonne Craig even for a minute — and if I had, she was fifteen years older than I was (twice my age!) and probably married or involved with someone. Had I fantasized about anything regarding her, it would have been talking with her and not making a total ninny of myself. When I was fifteen, even that didn't seem possible so there was no point in imagining the naughty stuff.

On the other hand, I was in the same math class as a girl named Becky who was just about as cute. Fantasizing about her seemed like a much better investment and…

Well, okay. That one didn't pay off…but I didn't feel too foolish when it didn't. It was a high dream but it was not unreachable. I just didn't reach it.

I'm finally getting around to reading Richard Zoglin's book about Bob Hope. Here's Mr. Zoglin and Dick Cavett as guests on Theater Talk, the Broadway chat show, and the subject of course is Hope. But I wanna tell ya…

Comedy Central is moving @Midnight with Chris Hardwick up to 11 PM for a while to fill the void before the Daily Show returns with new episodes with its new host. It moves up on September 8 and returns to its usual berth on September 21. The first Daily Show with Trevor Noah is September 28. I think that's a smart move. @Midnight is a pretty good show that could stand to have more viewers sample it and maybe decide to follow it @ midnight. No reports on what Larry Wilmore thinks of this but he may be able to play the situation for some comedic value.

• Donald Trump wants to end Birthright Citizenship because those kids didn't earn it. This is coming from a Birthright Billionaire.

Scott Walker and Marco Rubio have both issued "plans" to replace Obamacare with something that will make their base happy because it isn't Obamacare. I actually read them both and as Jonathan Chait notes, these aren't really plans so much as "skeletal descriptions of planlike concepts." In other words: "Actual Proposal To Come After I'm President."

But actually, I don't think either man will ever be President and they won't offer any further details before their candidacies end. To do that would hasten those endings because further details would reveal that they'd leave millions of people who now have decent, affordable health care with worse coverage, more expensive coverage or no coverage. Either that or their plans would repeat all sorts of things about Obamacare that their base considers evil…and they sure won't announce that.

How To Know When You're Getting Old: When you read obits for women on whom you once had crushes.

The fact that Yvonne Craig was 78 didn't make me feel old. To me, no matter how old she was, she was and always will be the age when I first saw her on TV. Oddly enough, it was not seeing her play Batgirl that aroused my interest. It was seeing her not play Batgirl. She couldn't be that beautiful to me in the costume because you couldn't see her face. Call me perverted if you like but I think the most attractive part of any attractive person is their face, especially around the eyes and smile.

Yvonne Craig had a great face. The rest of her was nice too but I sure liked that face.

The crush did not last long. Back then — back when she was on the Batman show and I was fifteen — my crushes ran hot for an average of about three weeks…and hey, why not? I mean, it's all fantasy, right? If you're going to fall in love with women you'll never meet, why not play the field? Yvonne was actually one of my longer crushes. I think she held the title for a little over ninety days, finishing ahead of Abby Dalton though falling several months shy of Mary Tyler Moore in her Laura Petrie days.

During my Yvonne crush, I didn't think I'd ever get closer to her than the publicity photo at below right. That's her pretending to be reading a copy of Detective Comics #359, the issue containing the debut of Batgirl and — and this of course is why this issue is so valuable now to collectors — a letter in the letters page from me. Based on the expression on Yvonne's face, it seemed obvious to me that she was reading my letter when this photo was taken.

But I did meet her. Around the turn of the century, the Hollywood Collectors Show hosted one of the 87,000 cast reunions for the Batman show. Those people saw more of each other at reunions and conventions than they ever did on the set. It was at the Beverly Garland Hotel and they had Adam and Burt and Julie and Frank and a few others…and Yvonne. An agent I knew named Fred Wostbrock had booked most of them in and he was there, protecting his clients from…well, just about everybody.

We chatted for a while and then Fred took me around to introduce me. Somehow, I found myself seated between Yvonne Craig and Julie Newmar — a place I once would have foregone my inheritance to sit in. We talked while they both signed autographs for a long line and I was impressed with how nice and tolerant they both were with their fans. Most were no trouble but one out of about every twenty-five seemed to have been green-screened into our world. The ladies were even nice to them.

They both struck me as being very smart and very aware.  You meet a lot of show business performers who are clueless about who they really are and what people like about them and what, if anything, they represent to their fans.  Not these two ladies.  They knew.

One of the photos Yvonne was selling and signing was the above pic of her with the comic book and I couldn't resist. I told her I had a letter published in that issue. She was way more impressed than she should have been.

A few fans later, a guy about my age had a copy of Detective Comics #359 that he wanted her to sign. Her handler collected the fee, Yvonne signed it and as she was about to hand it back to the gentleman, she asked me, "Is this the issue with your letter in it?" I told her it was and she began paging through it to find the letter page.

I looked at the owner of the comic. He had an uneasy look about her handling it so much. I knew that look. From a near-lifetime of being around collectors, I knew he was very, very interested in preserving its resale price and therefore feared her creasing or marring the pages. Actually, I knew that before she went searching through it because he'd declined to have her personalize the autograph.

Ms. Craig finally located the letter page and instantly had the exact same expression as in the photo. I guess her memory wasn't the greatest because she didn't seem to remember reading my letter when the photo was taken in 1967. Here — I'll let you see that letter. It's one of the better things I ever wrote…

That's it. Wish I could write like that now.

Yvonne read it aloud and I had to explain to her who the Elongated Man was. She then passed the issue over to Julie to read and be impressed. Ms. Newmar handled it with even less care and I could see its owner wondering if he should or could snatch it from the claws of Catwoman in order to preserve its near-mint condition. But then he really freaked out when he heard Yvonne say, "Hey, Mark. You should sign it too."

There was no way in the friggin' world that guy wanted me scrawling anything on his precious copy of Detective Comics #359. He yelled "No thanks" with much more urgency than was necessary. Yvonne said, "Oh, don't worry. He won't charge you for it." Then she handed me her signing pen and urged me to write my name in it.

I saw the guy cringe. Then when I handed the pen back to her and said, "I think he just wanted your signature on it," I saw him uncringe. He thanked me most sincerely and got away from there with his comic before anyone could do anything else to it.

And then I looked at Yvonne and saw her snicker. She knew exactly what she was putting him through.  Like I said: Very smart and very aware.

I should probably end this here but there's one other incident that happened a few minutes later that I will never forget. You have to trust me here, dear readers. The first part of this, you'll have no trouble believing. In fact, you'll easily believe the whole thing up until the last line but I swear it's true.

A rather nervous man also around my age approached the table and purchased several photos of Ms. Craig and Ms. Newmar in the skimpiest of apparel. They had many pics from which one could choose. He picked all the ones of Yvonne in a bikini and all the ones of Julie in lingerie. He paid a hefty fee for the photos and he asked that Yvonne and Julie personalize their signatures, which they were glad to do. He had prepared little 3×5 cards for each with his difficult-to-spell first name and both ladies complimented him on being so thoughtful.

Before he moved on, he addressed the two of them as if he'd written and rehearsed a little speech. He said, "I'd like to thank both of you for helping me through a difficult age of my life. I used to tune in the Batman show every time it was on to see you two. I was very disappointed, Miss Newmar, when there were episodes you were not in and very outraged when they had other women playing Catwoman. Nothing against Miss Eartha Kitt, of course, but for me there was only one Catwoman."

"That's very sweet of you," Julie said.

"I also maintained two scrapbooks, one for each of you, and every time I came across a photo of either of you, it would go into the appropriate scrapbook. Sad to say, I lost them in a flood but while I had them, they were very special to me. The photos of you two were very special to me as these will be."

"That's so nice of you," Yvonne said. Her tone of voice contained a subtle hint that that he should move on and let the next person in line make their purchases but he went on. He wasn't going to move on until he was certain he'd conveyed his message.

"I hope you understand. Looking at those photos of you made me feel so good. They just lightened up my life because you were both so lovely and wonderful and I wanted to make sure you understood."

"We understand," Yvonne said. "Thank you so much and now, if you'd let the others who've been waiting in line have their turns." He thanked them both five more times then finally slithered away with his purchases.

Once he was gone, Yvonne Craig turned to me and said, so no one else could hear: "Another guy who wants to make sure we understand that he masturbated to our photos."