Yearly Archives: 2015

The other day here, I linked to an article that claimed that in China, if a motorist accidentally injures a pedestrian, that motorist will often then try to kill the pedestrian because there's less penalty that way. Pretty horrifying, huh? If it's true, it sure is. Some questions have been raised as to how true it is and since I linked to the original piece, I thought I should link to this discussion of the article's veracity.

Matthew Yglesias analyzes Jeb Bush's proposed tax plan and — surprise, surprise — it turns out to be a more intense version of his brother's plan to slash taxes for the wealthiest Americans. We all saw how well that worked for everyone except the wealthiest Americans.

Beth Slick (Hi, Beth!) wrote to ask me if I have any thoughts on Neil Patrick Harris's new show, which debuts on NBC on Tuesday night. It's called Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris and here's how the network is describing it…

Five Emmy Awards and a Tony Award make multi-talented Neil Patrick Harris the perfect star for this live one-hour show that is unlike any other on American television. Anything can happen on Best Time Ever with Neil Patrick Harris, which will feature appearances by A-list stars, stunts, comedy skits, incredible performances, mini game shows, audience giveaways and hidden camera pranks.

Well, I think N.P.H. is one of the most talented people in show biz today so obviously, I'm going to watch…so that's a big plus. I like the idea of live TV where "anything can happen" and that sounds great, though I have one worry there. On most so-called "reality" shows these days, "anything can happen" works like this. The player can pick A or B. If he picks A, one pre-planned, mostly-scripted option happens and if he picks B, a different pre-planned, mostly-scripted option transpires.

To me, "anything can happen" oughta include contingencies that the host and producer could not have expected and therefore could not rehearse. If they really mean "anything can happen," great. If they mean it's all like a pre-written "which way" game, not as great.

Okay, what else is in there? A-list stars? Fine. Stunts? Depends what they are. I used to hate the old Beat the Clock style of game show where someone has to balance a prune on a spoon held in their mouth while they kick over bowling pins while wearing frogmen flippers. I don't like stunts designed to make the stunt performer look stupid. But if they're actually feats of dexterity or strategy, great.

Comedy skits? Fine if they're funny. Incredible performances? Who could have anything against incredible performances? Mini game shows? There are good game shows and bad game shows so I guess there are good mini game shows and bad mini game shows.

Audience giveaways? Nothing wrong with audience giveaways, especially if you're in the audience. So it all sounds somewhat promising and I'll be watching and —

Oh, wait. I missed one: Hidden camera pranks. Okay, we have a problem here and I have to own up to a prejudice…

I hate hidden camera pranks. Matter of fact, since about the age of thirty, I've hated pranks of any kind. I am guardedly proud of my involvement in one or two years ago that I'll tell you about some time. They were really, really clever and they actually made a legit point, the kind you might make with a deftly-presented argument.

But I've outgrown even that and it's been a long time since I saw anything called a "prank" which I didn't think was a case of the prankster being an enormous dick. Even when the person being pranked laughs about it and seems to love the experience, I often think either they're faking great sportsmanship or — in the case of TV pranks — that the show pranked a dozen people and threw out the video of the eleven who didn't think it was all great fun. Most of those being pranked on Best Time Ever will be those A-list stars so the latter will probably not apply here.

And I have one more reservation. They're billing this as a resurrection of variety shows on television. This isn't a variety show; not in the tradition of Carol Burnett, Dean Martin, Andy Williams, etc. This sounds like every program Howie Mandel has been on in the last ten years rolled into one.

Best Time Ever could well be a great show but it doesn't sound to me like a great variety show. And, hey, you know who's around these days who really does have all the necessary talents to do a great variety show? Neil Patrick Harris! I'd like to see him try one someday.

When it was announced that Rick Perry was "suspending" (i.e., ending) his campaign for the White House, Rand Paul put up an interesting tweet. Paul wrote, "What does it say about Republicans when a three-and-a-half-term governor with a successful record of creating jobs bows out, as a reality star leads in the polls?"

I'll tell you what it says. It says that at the moment, the Republicans who are responding to opinion polls — who may or may not reflect the ones who'll actually go to the real polls whenever we get to that stage of this election — really want to win. They want to look at the Oval Office and see Their Guy, no matter who Their Guy is.

They have plenty of time before the actual voting to decide who might actually do a good job running the country. Right now, they can say anyone for any reason.

The Senator from Kentucky might have also noted that not only is a reality star leading in the polls but the runner-up at the moment is another guy who's never served one day in any elected office. I can't even begin to explain Ben Carson's popularity except maybe that within the "We'll take anyone who isn't a traditional politician" mob, there's a large group of folks who think, "We'll take anyone who isn't a traditional politician but we draw the line at Trump."

And I have no particular feeling about whether I do or do not want to see Joe Biden enter the race…or whether he will or not. I do have one acquaintance who I think would love it because deep down, what he really wants is the Barack Obama administration but from a leader who's old, white and male.

One of these guys flew 3,000 miles to tape these network promos that were not used…

I mentioned this before but it's too good not to remind you again and maybe again…

When one of my favorite comedians Lewis Black tours, he does his show and then he does an extra show that is broadcast over the Internet. It's a video podcast that runs 20-30 minutes and some weeks, he has three different ones up on his website, The Rant Is Due. This seems to be the only place you can see them at the moment.

You can watch live but that's not easy since the start time can vary depending on when he finishes his regular performance. Then a day or two later, the recorded shows are available on the site and they remain up there for a few weeks before they're deleted. I have no idea if they'll ever be available again.

Usually, it's just Mr. Black answering questions submitted over the Internet or by the live audience but the newest one, which is there right now, is a 27 minute conversation with Tommy Smothers. You might want to give it a watch.

A lot of Mike Nichols' very famous friends talk about Mike Nichols.

As you must know by now, my father worked for the Internal Revenue Service. He hated the job but he needed that weekly paycheck and never thought he could find a situation where he'd get one doing something he liked better. I'm not sure he was wrong about that. He was a lovely, kind, compassionate man but he didn't seem to have any particularly marketable skills. So he spent his life in a job, not a career.

Here's how I'm differentiating those two nouns for the purpose of this article and its sequels to come. A career is something that fits into this sentence: "When I grow up, I want to be a ____." A job is what you do to pay rent and buy groceries if and when you aren't able to become whatever noun you ever seriously put into that sentence.

There are people who are very happy in jobs, especially but not limited to folks who never really put any occupation into that blank. I even know people who had long dreamed-of careers and gave them up for jobs because the careers didn't turn out to be as ideal as they'd seemed from afar.

I have heard people with what I call careers envy people with what I call jobs. Because life can be a lot different if you care passionately about having one particular profession, especially one where the competition is fierce, the hiring is overly subjective and you probably can't work in one place for very long.

My father wanted on and off in his youth to be a writer. He had a few other dreams — like professional singer and professional baseball player — for which he clearly lacked the physical requirements. Eventually, he came to realize that the only one that might at all be attainable was writing. (I do not, by the way, think that was a bad decision on his part. It was probably a very good decision. Dreams are fine but in this world, you have to have at least a little idea of what you can't do well. I have a very long list that could basically be summarized as "Almost everything except writing.")

I don't know if my father had the talent for writing but he sure lacked the thickness of skin and the ability to cope with rejection that the career requires. He could not get past the obstacle of someone in a position of authority telling him his work wasn't good enough. So he spent most of his adult life at the I.R.S. where every day, he came home bruised and nursing an ulcer because of superiors telling him his work wasn't good enough.

Around age six, I began declaring that I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I had no second choices or alternative dreams. A writer. That was it. My father greeted this news with mixed emotions.

He was thrilled at the possibility that his son — his only child, remember — might succeed in that field that had seemed so unachievable to him. But he feared that I was in for the same kind of heartbreak and feelings of failure that stopped him cold.

Several times, he sat me down and without telling me to change my mind about my goal, he cautioned me that it's a rough game full of shattered dreams and disappointment and people who say terrible, terrible things about what you've done. Once in a while, he told me the tale of the one time he and a friend had submitted writing samples to try out for a job at a radio station. He trembled as he told of the know-nothing boss who had told them their work was amateurish and to forget about ever earning a buck that way.

He pretty much did, especially after a friend who knew a bit about the writing business reminded him of something: Rejection for a writer is never a one-time experience. If the guy at the radio station had said yes, that wouldn't mean my father would have become a writer for the rest of his life. It meant he and his partner would have had a few weeks of work. Then they would have been back submitting their work to other bosses, possibly of the know-nothing variety.

That was a chilling thing to consider, especially during the Depression when too much of the population was without employment. It felt then like the most important thing a man could have was something steady — especially if he had the mad, impetuous idea of having a wife and children. Writing, he well knew, would never be steady.

That one rejection was so devastating that while he thereafter toyed at times with writing this or that, he never again put himself in a position where someone could hurt him like that again. Which means, of course, that he never again put himself in a position where he could succeed as a writer. Given his gentle nature, that may have been for the better.

No writer takes rejection well…and of course, when the publishers or producers do accept it and it's published or produced, you face an even more certain moment of rejection. Someone's going to say it stinks…maybe multiple someones. It might be a reviewer in a newspaper or some cluck with a blog or some acquaintance lacking in social skills and/or oozing envy. But someone's going to not like it and they well may wonder aloud how such an obvious incompetent like you isn't running the deep fryer at Hardee's for a living because you obviously lack any talent whatsoever for writing.

This is the first in a series of essays I'll be posting on this blog — one every week or three — about the two kinds of rejection a writer must face: Rejection by the person or persons who hire and rejection by the intended audience. I don't know how many installments there'll be but there will probably be a lot of them. I have a lot to say on these topics.

Please be kind. I have learned how to handle rejection when it happens with everything else I've written. I'm not sure I can handle rejection of articles about rejection. Thank you.

And you can even set a non-TiVo brand Digital Video Recorder or even a VCR. Heck, if you're really primeval, you can just watch live…

The PBS series American Experience has produced a lengthy look at the life of Walt Disney and it airs in two parts beginning Monday night in most areas. Part One is Monday, Part Two is Tuesday.

I've only seen pieces but a few folks who've viewed the whole thing tell me it's kind of shallow and that it misses a lot of important details — as might be expected in a documentary about Disney that runs under around nine hours. One friend complained it perpetuates the "Walt did everything" myth.

One of the main problems with shows like this is often that they're made at least twenty years too late. The very first thing in this one is a brief snippet of a recent interview with Floyd Norman and this is followed by a brief recent comment by Richard Sherman. That's almost to be expected as Walt died almost a half-century ago…which yields a certain shortage of people who worked closely with him and are still around to be interviewed. The project still may be an enlightening endeavor but if and when they get into what kind of man Walt Disney was, my skepticism will go up with each analysis by someone who never met him.

As an intro to the show, Neal Gabler has a piece in The New York Times and Mr. Gabler was apparently involved a lot or consulted or was interviewed for American Experience. I thought his long biography of Disney some years back, though filled with useful historical information, tried a bit too hard to view him as a dark, troubled individual.

Having never gotten any closer to Walt than watching him introduce Davy Crockett episodes, I can't say that portrait was wrong but I'm also not sure there's enough evidence around to say that it was correct. Let's see what this take on Mr. Disney has to say.

Also debuting the same night on PBS is a new episode of the biographical series, In Their Own Words, this one about Jim Henson. This appears to be creative scheduling intended to make a statement or draw a parallel or something. I have my TiVo set for it, as well.

Writing tips from Stephen King…

Is it really okay to eat food that's fallen onto the floor? Even if you pick it up in under five seconds? Someone actually did a study on this and here are the results. (SPOILER ALERT: It depends how dirty your floor is.)

Jerry K. writes to ask…

What do you think the chances are that Stephen Colbert will take the crown away from Jimmy Fallon as current King of Late Night?

It wouldn't surprise me but increasingly, that's becoming a pointless honor. What's the criteria? Highest overall ratings? Highest ratings in the key demographic? Most profitable show? Longest running show? Most awards? Most videos gone viral? We may well see Colbert, Fallon and Kimmel each "win" one or more of those distinctions and in the end, what does it matter?

It's probably the case now that all three shows are making money and none of them is in any danger of being canceled. Remember in the "Late Night Wars," Leno didn't knock Letterman off the air and Letterman didn't knock Leno off, nor was there a moment when either of those fatalities was possible. Ultimately, they were both knocked off by the passage of time.

If you want to pick your fave and root for him to "win" in any of the above ways, fine. I don't think it matters much. (Well, it never really did. It just matters even less now.)

As longtime readers of this blog know, I'm a big fan of a performer named Frank Ferrante. Frank tours the country with his show, An Evening With Groucho in which he stunningly recreates the comedy legend. I was never a big fan of "impersonator" shows because the impersonation is usually good for about five minutes and you never really forget it's some guy doing an imitation. But Frank so completely disappears behind the painted-on mustache and eyebrows that you can pretend you're watching the one, the only…

Later this month, he'll be in Wisconsin, North Carolina and Minnesota…and you can find his whole touring schedule here. We're most excited that on January 9 and 10 of 2016, he'll make one of his rare stops close to Los Angeles. He'll be out at the Pasadena Playhouse where he sold the place out the last time he was booked there. If you're anywhere near there, it wouldn't hurt to order tickets now. They just went on sale so you should be able to grab some good seats.

I've been plugging this show for years and I can't tell you how many people have written to thank me and say, "He was everything you said he was." I like people who prove me right. There aren't a lot of them.

Last Sunday here, I wrote, "…we have between twelve and eighteen silent film actors still alive, the youngest of whom is probably Our Gang's Dickie Moore, who is 89." Sadly, that was no longer a true statement as of the next day. Moore died on Monday in Connecticut. Leonard Maltin has a good remembrance of the boy and man.

• Bobby Jindal excited at today's announcement. He could double his base of support if he picks up both Rick Perry supporters.