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.
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.
Mike Douglas, Phil Seuling, Wendy Pini, Jamie Farr.
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.
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.
What's Craig Ferguson up to now? Mostly, he's on tour with his stand-up act. You'll be able to find out if he's coming near you over at his new website.
Yeah, I watched some of the Golden Globes last night. I liked the monologue (duologue?) by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler but I'm rarely in the mood for hours of millionaires honoring each other and it's especially hard to take when it's an award that everyone knows is voted on by a small group of unimportant folks. It would be like if all the gardeners who cut lawns on my block got together and named The Garfield Show Best TV Series Ever and I put on a tux and thanked everyone as if the whole world had decided that. The Academy Awards at least are chosen by people who are close enough to the business to get free screeners.
Each year, my pal Bob Elisberg explains on his blog why the Golden Globes involve a lot of people pretending they mean something when they don't. He also debunks the myth that they're even a good barometer of how the Oscars will fall. Bob's right. But of course, it's a big party and it's televised and the award has a cool name and it looks good on your mantle or in ads. So everyone goes along with it.
The only two good things about the ceremony each year are the opening jokes and Ken Levine's review the next day.
Here's another report on Frank Ferrante's show yesterday. I enjoyed meeting Daniel Faigin after the performance and you can read on his blog how much he enjoyed Frank.
By the way: I met Hal Holbrook a few months ago when I went to see him do Mark Twain Tonight. I was hoping to run into him yesterday in the parking lot so I could ask him about the slush fund controlled by H.R. Haldeman and he could tell me to follow the money.
(In case you don't get the reference: In the movie of All the President's Men, Holbrook played the character of Deep Throat, the informant who helped out Woodward and Bernstein. It must have been an interesting challenge for Mr. Holbrook. He had to portray a real person without knowing who that person was. At the time, Bernstein and Woodward wouldn't tell the filmmakers who D.T. really was and the filmmakers were worried that it would come out that Deep Throat was a black dwarf or a lady wrestler or something. Woodward assured them the casting of Hal Holbrook was a good choice. And if you ever saw an interview with Mark Felt, the gent who was eventually revealed to be the Mystery Man, you can see that he was.)
I am still dealing with e-mail problems and also with deadlines so there may be a Soup Day or two in the coming week. Your understanding is always appreciated.
So this article by Joanna Robinson says that Stephen Colbert will debut as host of The Late Show on September 8. The headline on the piece calls that "almost a year" but it's actually a bit less than eight months from now or, if you want to get specific, eight months and 21 days since the final Colbert Report. I have a hunch that when the decision was made as to when to end that show, the deciders thought Mr. Letterman would be leaving after the February sweeps instead of the May sweeps.
Dave's last show is May 20. That means sixteen weeks before Colbert debuts and as the article notes, CBS plans to fill those weeks with reruns of prime-time series. Ms. Robinson writes, "It's interesting that CBS is choosing to go with reruns rather than hiring a roster of guest hosts like Judd Apatow, Drew Carey, Will Arnett (or, hey, maybe even a lady), as they are doing to cover the gap between Craig Ferguson's exit and James Corden's debut on The Late Late Show." I believe it was also suggested that Corden's show could start an hour earlier during that time period.
Why are they doing it this way? Because, I assume, some folks thought that putting anyone else behind a desk in that slot would feel like they were auditioning potential replacements for Colbert if he doesn't perform up to expectations. Certainly, some of the folks who are filling in at 12:35 — though probably not Drew Carey — will be feeling it's their chance to show what they would do with that show or a show like that. There would also be the problem of where to do that interim show and then you'd have to assemble a crew to do it. The place-filler show at 12:35 now is just using Craig Ferguson's old set, staff, logo, announcer, etc. Even non-Ferguson footage from his opening.
I watched Drew Carey's first week and there were some funny moments, many of them courtesy of his Price is Right sidekick, George Gray, who tagged along. Carey had some sharp monologue jokes but otherwise looked like he was watching someone's house for them while they were out of town and was eager to get back to his own home. On Friday, they had a last minute cancellation of their lead guest, Sharon Osbourne. So who did they get? They got the guy who's always available and will do anything to get in front of an audience — the same guy they called when that happened with Ferguson. That's right: Larry King. Next time I have someone cancel on one of my panels at Comic-Con, I'm calling Larry. I'll bet he'll be there in a flash.
I'm still curious about something. All this week, that timeslot will be inhabited by a nighttime version of the daytime show, The Talk. Then the following week, Jim Gaffigan and Judd Apatow are splitting the week. The CBS production schedule shows that Gaffigan and Apatow are recording their shows each afternoon of that week and then the shows air later each day. Okay, fine. But the schedule also shows that this week, Drew Carey is hosting three more shows. On Wednesday, for example, he has on Pauley Perrette, Josh Malina and Cathy Ladman.
The production schedule goes through February 20 and is filled with shows that will air ten or so hours after they're recorded. So why are they doing three shows this week with Drew? I can't recall a network ever taping a late night talk show six or more weeks before it was telecast.
And the other question arises when you look at the list of guest hosts that includes Will Arnett, Wayne Brady, Tom Lennon, Kunal Nayyar and John Mayer. Are they really going to not let any women host before James Corden takes over?
Yesterday, I went to see Frank Ferrante do An Evening with Groucho in the afternoon. By my count, this is the eighth time I've seen him do this but that's fine because the show's a little different each performance — Frank varies the content plus there's all that improvisation with the audience. Even if it was the same show, I could watch him over and over.
I especially love the opening when he comes out as Frank and talks with the audience about what Groucho meant to his life as a point of personal inspiration. As he's doing this, he applies the last of his makeup — the eyebrows and 'stache — and then suddenly, the Italian guy disappears and there's Groucho. The audience always make a quiet, impressed gasp and it's like someone has made the late, great comedian appear before us.
And then he goes on being Groucho for the next 90 minutes or so. The folks yesterday who packed the place sure enjoyed it.
One was another point of personal inspiration in Frank's life: Hal Holbrook. Hal Holbrook, who just about invented the concept of playing a historical figure in a one-man show as a theatrical experience, was in the house and very approving. There was a lot of mutual admiration in the air. I was also gratified by the number of folks who came up to me, said they'd bought tickets because of this very blog and said, "You were right about Frank." It's always nice to be told you were right about anything.
This was Frank's last Groucho date until April, when he'll be in Palm Beach. When his entire 2015 schedule comes out, I'll let you know so you can go see him, enjoy his fine show and then write and tell me I'm right about him.
Here's a blast from the past — from 7/8/02 to be specific…
Time to recall another toy from my childhood: I was never particularly into toy guns but around the time I was eight, Mattel brought out what momentarily seemed like a Must-Own. It was the Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun…a tiny toy derringer built into a belt buckle. The premise here was that you were caught unarmed by the bad guys. "Put your hands up," they'd command and, since they had more conventional Mattel cap pistols (like the lethal Fanner 50 model) trained on you, you'd comply…and it would look like you were done-for. But! What they didn't realize was that you, shrewd lawman that you were, were wearing your Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun belt buckle. Just as they were about to pull their triggers, you would stick your tummy out and spring the control on the obverse side of the buckle. Suddenly, the derringer would pop out and fire at whoever was standing in front of you! What a secret weapon.
Of course, in real life, it didn't work precisely the way it did in the commercials. Few toys of my childhood ever did. First off, if you exhaled too much — or sometimes, for no reason at all — the derringer would spring out and fire before you were ready. The answer to this was that there was a little lock on the bottom of the buckle. Just before you were ready to fire, you had to take the lock off…which, of course, telegraphed to the bad guys that you were up to something and they would kill you before you could.
Another problem was that, in the commercial, the good guy would pop the buckle and shoot one bad guy, then snatch the derringer off the buckle lever and use it to fire several more shots, felling the other villains. This looked neat in the commercial but once you got your Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun, you discovered that it could only fire one shot before you had to stop and reload.
This took about five minutes. Mattel Shootin' Shell guns worked with a three-part ammo. One part was a plastic bullet — this was the part that actually fired. The derringer came with ten of these and after you shot people, you had to run around and find your plastic bullets so you could reuse them. Often, you couldn't, so you had to run out and buy another pack of plastic bullets.
You would insert one plastic bullet into a metal casing with a little spring in it. The derringer buckle came with two. Then, you'd take a page of Mattel's special caps — little round, green ones on a sheet of peel-off labels. You'd apply one cap to the back end of the bullet casing and you'd have a complete bullet you could insert into the gun and fire.
It was all a clumsy, awkward assembly and half the time, the cap would not explode so the plastic part of the bullet would be launched with an unexciting thud.
I remember having a semi-wonderful time with my Shootin' Shell Buckle Gun for about three days, or until I'd acted out the big ambush scene with all five of my friends. Then I stuck it in the back of my closet and got out my Chutes-'n'-Ladders board game. It didn't make a loud bang but at least it didn't force me to crawl around in the grass looking for my plastic bullets. Paladin — the guy on Have Gun, Will Travel — never had to do that.
Ray Bradbury lived for much of his life in a lovely little home in the Cheviot Hills area of Los Angeles, not far from where I grew up. The address was never much of a secret and when I was about twelve, a friend of mine and I walked over to it, then walked back and forth past it a few times. I guess we were hoping to spot him coming in or out and then we'd wave to him and he'd talk to us and invite us in and give us autographed books or…well, I'm not sure what we were hoping would happen. We would have been happy just to get a glimpse of him. We settled for the "closeness" of knowing we were walking past his home.
Later, I got to know him. A few times when he was at comic or science-fiction conventions, I'd offer to save him the cab fare and drive him home. Twice…maybe three times…he invited me in and we talked for a while. So there was something a bit magical to me about that home.
Last May, his family put it on the market with an asking price of $1.5 million. For that neighborhood, that was reasonable so I'm guessing it went for something around that figure. And late last week, they began tearing it down to build something new.
I just read some online messages that when they quit the demolition work on Friday, the house was without a roof. And now it's raining in Los Angeles…
Those of you who are familiar with Ray's story "There Will Come Soft Rains" will appreciate the imagery.
