Yearly Archives: 2015

Frank Rich explains Donald Trump…and boy, is it a long explanation.

This amuses me more than it probably should. We were talking here earlier about photos being misidentified on the web. This happens a lot and it happens nowhere more than over on eBay.

Yesterday morn, I went net-surfing to find a decent photo of Jack Larson to post with his obit. Once in a while, I locate what I seek over on eBay so I went there, searched for "Jack Larson" and this is one of the listings I found…

That's right. It's Jerry Thomas and Jack Larson in the 1965 movie, How to Murder Your Wife. Those of you who thought that film starred Terry-Thomas and Jack Lemmon…well, you obviously don't know what the hell you're talking about.

How did this confusion occur? Well, like a lot of photos that turn up on eBay these days, this picture is being sold because a newspaper decided to digitize (or maybe just dump) its photo archives and sell the originals. Here is what was written on the back of this photo…

If you didn't know better, you might think that said "Jerry Thomas" and "Jack Larson." I doubt that was a scanning error…probably a human one made by someone too young to at least recognize Jack Lemmon. Mr. Lemmon was a pretty big star in his day.

My friend Steve Stoliar, who'll be featured in the next Video Link I post, is driven mad by some of the eBay identifications of who's Groucho Marx and who isn't. It's not just that sellers think someone dressed as Groucho is Groucho. Sometimes, they think Eli Wallach not dressed up like Groucho is Groucho or that George Jessel, looking just like George Jessel is Groucho or that Laurel and Hardy are the Marx Brothers.

Actually, anyone with a mustache and prominent eyebrows is likely to be identified as Groucho because a pic of Groucho will sell better than a photo labelled as "Unknown man with mustache and prominent eyebrows." I especially liked the seller a few years ago who posted a photo he said was Groucho Marx without his mustache. Apparently, many folks wrote in to inform him it was actually Bud Abbott without his mustache.

The seller changed the listing to read that it was "Bud Abbott disguised as Groucho Marx." No one bought it so he relisted it as "Groucho Marx disguised as Bud Abbott" — and he got twenty bucks for it. If you're interested in the photo of Jerry Thomas and Jack Larson, it's been marked down to $27.00. Hey, it's the only known photo of Jerry and Jack together.

Stephen Colbert had Ted Cruz on last night and the result was a perfect example of why I don't like politicians on talk shows that are focused on entertainment and short segments. Colbert strikes me as better informed than almost anyone who's had that kind of gig and, yes, he did ask a few questions of substance. But anyone who's seeking public office should be asked more than a few questions of substance…and by a questioner whose goal isn't to have the segment end with everyone happy and the guest willing to come back.

These things always seem to me like an unhealthy bargain. The Colbert show undoubtedly got some tune-in last night because of Cruz. Those who love Cruz watched to support him and to hope that he'd slap that Liberal star around. Those who loathe Cruz watched to hope Colbert would nail Cruz with the question that would end the guy's candidacy. Given the limitations of time and format, neither of those things were likely to happen.

What mainly happened is that Cruz got to show the world his human side and to seem like a reasonable guy with a sense of humor. That may or may not be who he is. He got to say he doesn't consider his political opponents "diabolical" without Colbert citing many past statements where Cruz tried to whip up support by insisting just that. He got to make some assertions about the glories of the economy under Reagan and the wrongness of how Gay Marriage was legalized in this country without Colbert having the time (or seriousness of intent) to challenge what he said.

This kind of thing almost always seems wrong to me, whether it's a Democrat or a Republican or Bernie Sanders. Once in a while, it can be interesting. The conversation Colbert had with Joe Biden recently was fascinating…but Biden wasn't running for anything — at least at that moment — and I doubt he made one factual assertion his opponents would dispute. But the conversation Colbert had with Sanders was close to an infomercial and even though I generally side with "The Bern" on most issues, I thought it was a misappropriation of airtime and talk show resources.

Tonight, Colbert has Donald Trump on. That might turn out to be one of the exceptions because it may well be more of an entertainment segment than a political one. But I still wish talk shows would stop doing this.

This is the second in a series of essays here about how professional or aspiring professional writers can and must cope with two various kinds of rejection — rejection of your work by the buyers and rejection by various folks in the audience. Part 1 can be read here.

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One important point in dealing with the latter is that you need to have realistic expectations. I don't know how often this has happened: A writer friend has called me for comfort and reassurance when his new book (or show or whatever) got a withering review. I ask him about the overall reception and learn that he's gotten twelve notices — eleven in the good-to-rave category, one that likened his work to the flinging of feces. He's so destroyed by #12 that he's forgotten #1-11.

The problem there is that he's set himself up for defoliation. It's like buying one lottery ticket and then being crushed when it turns out you didn't win. Unanimous approval happens about as often as me or you winning the $45,000,000 grand prize.

Mickey Mantle didn't step up to the plate expecting his every swing to clear the left field fence so he was not crushed when he struck out. His lifetime batting average was around .300 and that's just fine. Imagine a player feeling like an abject failure because he didn't do a lot better than that.

Someone once observed that the difference between an American playwright and a British playwright was as follows: In England, a great playwright is someone who now and then writes a great play. In America, a great playwright is someone whose last play was great. The latter approach can make for a lot of grief and anguish and it can even make a writer afraid to take chances and to not play it safe.

Even if you play it as safe as humanly possible as a writer, you will have failures. They are unavoidable — some may not even be your fault — and I've had friends do incredible damage to themselves by not accepting that as a reality. What you should hope is to have successes of sufficient quantity and magnitude that you can stay in the game. As long as you can stay in the game, you have a chance to hit a home run next time at bat.

Also, remember that it is (usually) not you they don't like but the product. As readers of this blog know, I hate cole slaw. If you are a fine chef and you make me cole slaw, I'm not going to like it. If you write certain kinds of stories, I'm not going to like them either.

I think writers get crushed a lot by rejections that are in the same category as trying to make me love your cole slaw. It's like entering a contest you can't win. I ain't gonna shine on Dancing with the Stars or in the Short Track Speed Skating event at the next Winter Olympics. Entering something like that is just begging for failure and rejection.

There are writing assignments that are like that because of your limitations but there are also those where you simply can't succeed, no matter what you do. I shall favor you with but two examples, both cases of motion picture producers I've encountered in my career. I'll call them Frick and Frack.

Mr. Frick, I met in the late seventies. He had co-produced one movie for Paramount and now had an office on the lot from which, I was told, he hoped to develop screenplays for production. A mutual friend steered me to him and we hit it off well. He was a nice guy and he laughed in all the right places — always a good sign. He gave me some broad parameters of the kinds of ideas he was looking for and invited me to go off and come up with some, then come back and pitch them to him.

It seemed like a great opportunity. The guy was indeed a producer. He had an office at Paramount. He liked me. How could that not be worth my time to pursue?

SPOILER ALERT: The guy had no ability to get a movie made or even to pay for any writing. I'll tell you why in a moment.

Cluelessly thinking all I had to do was come back to him with the right idea, I spent a week or two of pondering. Once I thought I had three good ones, I went back and clicked into performance mode. One by one, my ideas were shot down. The first one was all wrong for these reasons. The second would never work for those reasons. The third was just plain a bad idea.

I didn't think any of them were terrible but he thought they all were…so that was it for those three ideas. But he still liked me and he encouraged me and he said, "Well, maybe now you have a better idea of what I'm looking for." That seemed possible so I went home, came up with three more and returned to his office, resulting in three more strike-outs. In fact, he seemed to like these three less than the first three…and he hadn't liked the first three at all.

He urged me to try, try again and he did it so nicely and sincerely that I almost did. What stopped me is that, via that most powerful of show business forces — dumb luck — I happened to meet another writer who'd been playing the same game with Mr. Frick. The writer had given up after four pitch sessions, asked around and learned what he thought was the reason for all the turndowns…

Mr. Frick was not a producer. Though he had that office on the Paramount lot, the studio had zero interest in him producing anything for them and he knew it.

He had not really even been a producer on that one film with his name on it. A friend then in power had set him up with the job, he'd botched it and another producer had to be brought in. They shared co-producer credit but the other guy had done all the work. Mr. Frick had then reverted to his previous job, which was as a consultant on matters of foreign distribution. That's why he had that office at Paramount and though it was in the building with real producers, he was no longer one of them. I might as well have been pitching to one of the janitors.

Frick had not accepted his fate so he continued to try and be a kind of "pretend" producer, taking meetings like mine when he wasn't doing his consulting work. The writer who tipped me off had a theory: "He thinks that if he hangs in there for a while, taking meetings and acting like an in-house producer who produces movies, eventually there will be some new Paramount execs who will think he is one."

That put him in this position: If he'd said to me, "Hey, that's a great idea," he would then have had to do something with it. He'd have to have Paramount draw up a contract and pay me money…and Paramount wasn't about to do that for anything he told them he wanted to do. His enthusiasm for an idea carried zero weight with the current guys in charge. So he had to hate all ideas pitched to him while he bided his time and hoped somehow that would change.

My friend's theory made way too much sense to me so I gave up on Mr. Frick. He passed away about twelve years later and if the Internet Movie Database is to believed — and sometimes, it is — he never produced anything else again in his career.

I'd thought my ideas were being rejected because they were rotten. They may have been — I pitched a few of them elsewhere and didn't get any takers — but that wasn't why he turned them down. The whole thing was akin to one of those unwinnable carnival games where you take home the Big Prize if you can knock down all three milk bottles by throwing a baseball at them — and one of the milk bottles is weighted-down so even a hurricane couldn't topple it.

I have come to believe this happens a lot with writers: They're playing a game that cannot be won. Either they're trying to sell the right thing to the wrong guy or the wrong thing to the right guy…or, once in a while, even the wrong thing to the wrong guy. And then they think they bombed because someone thought their scripts or pitches stunk.

In the next one of these, I'll tell you about Mr. Frack — who did produce movies, many of them. And I'll tell why you'd have had just as much chance of selling him your screenplay as you would have of selling it to Mr. Frick.

William Saletan explains why all this talk about Pope Francis being a Liberal, modern pope is a lot of wishful delusion on some folks' part. Mr. Saletan thinks people are reading way too much into statements and encyclicals that are (mostly) Vatican Business As Usual.

Jay Scott Pike died September 13 after a brief illness. He was 91 and since the mid-forties, he had been a painter and a comic book artist specializing in beautiful women. Between 1949 and 1973 (both dates approximate), he drew around a thousand comic book stories. Probably around 800 of those were assigned to him because they needed an artist who could draw good-looking ladies.

Pike's earliest comic book work appears to have been for Hillman Comics in 1949. He did westerns and romance for them, then worked for Atlas (now Marvel) for most of the fifties on war, horror, westerns and romance comics — romance, especially. He was also their go-to guy for female versions of Tarzan. He drew Jann of the Jungle and Lorna the Jungle Girl. He eventually found his way to DC Comics where he spent most of the sixties drawing (mostly) romance comics.

One interesting exception was a 1968 issue of Showcase featuring a Pike creation, Dolphin. It was a unique, haunting combination of a super-hero comic and a romance title and while DC then did not allow the project to go beyond the one issue, the book — which Pike wrote and drew — made a lasting impression. Later writers could not resist reviving the character and fans of that one issue often commissioned Pike to do paintings of the lovely Dolphin. The photo above shows the artist with one of them.

When he wasn't doing comics, Pike did paintings for men's magazines and advertising — usually, though not exclusively glamour girl stuff. He was real, real good at everything he did but especially at drawing and painting pretty women. His work will doubtlessly be exhibited and reprinted as long as folks want to see pretty women. I figure that's going to be a long, long time.

Teller (of "Penn & ___") discusses the working premise of their show, Penn & Teller: Fool Us. I like the show for a number of reasons, one being that an important thing people have to keep in mind when they see magic is that it's always a trick. No one can read minds. No one can levitate. A good magician reminds you that just because you can't figure out how it's done, the explanation is not unearthly powers.

Gary Jacobstreats us to a preview of a speech from President Trump. Thanks to Steve Stoliar for telling me about this. Steve will be mentioned several more times on this blog in the next 24 hours.

A pretty good interview with Bill Clinton. Even those who didn't like him in the White House may enjoy seeing what he says in the interviewee chair.

Harry Enten (who's on Nate Silver's team) gives us scenarios for Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and even Joe Biden should he decide he wants the Democratic nomination. I don't know how I feel about any of these people getting it. I keep thinking that there are events ahead that will change the whole race so much in both parties that we'll look back and realize what a waste it was to look at polls in September of 2015.

Jack Larson, who would surely have preferred to be identified as "Playwright Jack Larson" than "The guy who played Jimmy Olsen" has died. Mr. Larson, who often fibbed about his age, would probably also have liked it if all the obits (like this one) were not revealing he was 87.

He actually had a pretty impressive career writing plays and opera librettos but of course, his role as "Young Olsen" on the George Reeves Superman show was a hard thing to escape. The series was done on a pauper's budget but worked I thought, largely because of the acting abilities of the leads. And no one did more to make it a classic than Jack Larson.

I had the pleasure of meeting him on several occasions when he'd agreed, probably after much prodding, to make an appearance in connection with that role. He always seemed like it was a burden in his life, one he occasionally had to make peace with. He was very fond of Noel Neill, who played Lois Lane…and Noel, who loved the attention (and fees) she got for her past work on the series, occasionally dragged him to some event.

Both, of course, experienced the yin and yang of their casting in that classic series. The good was that it made them famous and that despite the rotten pay and killer hours, it was in many ways a great experience. The bad was the rotten pay, the fact that their contracts kept them from pursuing other opportunities at the time, and that when it was over, there seemed to be no acting work for either.

That led Larson into writing plays. As a guy who was such a good actor, he must have often wondered where that career would have gone if he'd said no to The Adventures of Superman.

One time, I went in to do an on-camera interview for one volume of those shows on DVD. Larson and Neill were scheduled after me and on my way out, I ran into them in the lobby. Noel, who I'd interviewed not long before at a convention, introduced me to Jack, though I'd met him before. Ginning up some small talk, I said to both of them, "They'll treat you wonderfully in there. The makeup lady is a special joy."

Larson blanched and said, "Makeup? Do I have to have makeup?" I said, "No, I had to have makeup. I don't look like I belong on camera unless they do the same job on me they used to do on Lon Chaney."

He said, "I just don't like makeup. I don't like being on camera at all these days."

I said, "Well then, you made the right career transition. But you were awfully good on camera when you did like it. You know, it's not the fabulous scripts and lavish production values that made those shows so popular that fifty years later, people want to buy DVDs of them."

He smiled and said, "It was George."

I said, "George and those two people who played reporters." I was serious about that. He grinned and I'd like to think he accepted the compliment. Because he really was terrific on that show. So was Noel. And George.

From 1967: Groucho Marx introduces Dick Cavett on The Kraft Music Hall. This was the stand-up routine that brought Cavett to a fair amount of prominence. The following year, he got his first talk show on ABC…

Two other points about the Emmy Awards: Another reason that awards shows may have seemed better back in the past is that generally (there are exceptions) the nominees and winners nowadays tend to be folks who've been in the business a short amount of time. Twenty or thirty years ago, people did not become stars so instantly. So there was more sense of history up there.

Also, once upon a time, Big Stars didn't make as much money as Big Stars do these days. I mean, even adjusted for inflation, Matthew McConaughey probably earns ten times what Rod Steiger got to star in a movie…and we're also much more conscious of the money involved. Everyone knows roughly the kind of dough that Leonardo di Caprio gets per picture. That makes it a little harder to root for the guy. Imagine watching The Price is Right if everyone they called to "come on down" was already a multi-millionaire.

None of this changes my main point, though. That's what award shows are: People who are already very, very blessed getting a tiny bit more blessed. There's a limit to how entertaining that can ever be.

I just watched this year's Emmy Awards and before I read any reviews or blogs about it anywhere, I want to say something: That's about as good as the Emmy Awards ever are. I'm not saying it was a great show compared to other things we see on television. I'm saying that's about as good as the Emmy Awards ever are.

Award shows seem to bring out the horror in some people, gasping at how awful the telecast was…and yes, once in a while, the Emmycast or Oscarcast or Whatevercast could have been better…but not that much better. These shows are, after all, about very rich, famous people honoring each other and thanking their agents and celebrating that they just got richer and more famous.

(Something I haven't made my mind up about: There's a trend in award shows especially among actors to get up there and talk about how awesome and brilliant the other nominees were. I haven't decided if that's humility — to show respect for others — or another way of saying, "The other nominees were phenomenal…so I must have been super-phenomenal to have beaten them!")

The shows might be more memorable if certain longshot people had won or if certain winners had started crying or had great emotional moments. Those things are, of course, out of the hands of those who produce and stage the telecast. When I say this is as good as these shows get, I'm not talking about such moments.

I'm saying — and I know I'm repeating myself so this is the last time I'll say it — this is about as good as the Emmy Awards ever are. If you're recalling a Golden Age where the Emmys or Oscars were more special, I suggest you were just younger and more impressed then. Or maybe certain nominees or winners simply meant more to you. I mean, I was thrilled when Jack Lemmon won an Oscar. It's silly of me to fault the Academy Awards because I don't love any of the current actors as much as I loved Jack Lemmon.

If you found it all dreary and corny and overflowing with ego…well, that's what you tuned in to watch, Bunky. Complaining about that stuff is like watching the Westminster Dog Show and griping that it's just hours and hours of pooches and bitches.

I'm enjoying Stephen Colbert's Late Show…and I just say that it's a pleasure for me to once again have a late night show I can watch each night, almost start to finish. (They all lose me during most of the musical acts…and I rarely get the feeling that even the hosts are that interested in some of the performances they introduce with faux enthusiasm. Do we think Dave had even heard of half of those musicians?)

Oh, there are things about Colbert's show I don't love. The opening where he comes out and dances with his bandleader looks like a parody of some other show where the host does that. The opening title with him doing his own announce — repeating what he just said — feels like filler.

He keeps asking the audience each night, "Are you ready to hear the new Late Show theme?" How could the people who come to his tapings not be ready for anything that's going to happen anyway? This is one of those crowd-rousing gimmicks that everyone uses to wring louder enthusiasm out of an audience — "Are you ready for what you're here to see?" — and I would have thought the cleverest guy on TV would be above using it.

A few of the prepared pieces injected into his guest interviews haven't been as good as the conversations they cut short. And the energy of the show feels a bit too hyped, like the audience has been threatened with severe beatings if they don't cheer and stand and chant enough.

I can overlook all that because the show's new and the host is terrific and I'm optimistic that it'll only get better. If it stayed "as is," I'd still watch because he's a good interviewer and he has some sharp material. Best of all, I just find it pleasant to spend an hour with the guy. He seems to genuinely enjoy doing his program and having those people on — a happiness his predecessor only managed to display on occasion his last decade or so.

Interesting to me is what he hasn't done yet. Colbert is probably the best "sketch" comedian to ever have a late night show and they haven't attempted anything that puts him into a character other than himself.

Also, except for a brief dance lesson Friday night, they haven't attempted what used to be a key component of this kind of program. That's the "demonstration" — someone comes on to teach the host how to cook or do a stunt or try a science experiment or something. In recent years, talk shows have done less and less of that and when they have, the spots have usually been largely scripted and rehearsed. Colbert's a great improviser. I'd love to see him try to do some of those segments without rehearsals and lines on the prompter.

As for the ratings…

I'm guessing CBS is a tad disappointed but they are making money — certainly way more than they made with Dave there the last 10+ years. Colbert is in no danger of being axed so he'll have plenty of time to refine his show and attract new loyalites. Also on his old show, the guy was really good at attracting attention (and therefore, viewers) with extra-curricular ventures like running for president or otherwise getting in the news. He hasn't tried any of that yet, either.

But he will and I'll be watching. If you aren't warming to the show yet, I'll let you know when I think it gets better.