John Cassidy on Chris Christie's chances of becoming President, which are about the same as mine of becoming Ms. Teenage USA. I'm kinda curious as to whether Christie — who'd probably lose in a landslide if he ran again for his current job — actually thinks he can get the nomination or, if not, what he expects to get out of running. I can't even imagine Fox News hiring him.
Yearly Archives: 2015
Big Correction
I did a stupid thing. When I wrote up the description for this year's Jack Kirby Tribute Panel at Comic-Con, I had to list a credit for each of the panelists, one of whom is Rob Liefeld. My brain was apparently in Park when I typed, "Rob Liefeld (Spawn)."
Rob Liefeld, of course, did not do Spawn. Rob Liefeld did Youngblood and Bloodstrike and lots of other fine, popular comics. Todd McFarlane did Spawn. I knew that but the wrong name came out of my head and made its way down to my typing fingers. It's on the online Program Guide that way and I think I can get that changed. It's almost certainly in the printed Program Guide that way and I'm pretty sure it's too late to get that changed.
My apologies to both Rob and Todd, two very good guys who I assume will laugh this off. I'm still embarrassed to have done it.
Recommended Reading
Robert J. Smith thinks there might just now be five votes on the U.S. Supreme Court to declare the Death Penalty unconstitutional. I do not know if that's so but if you think the decisions last week made some people angry…
Straw Man
In response to Donald Trump's Mexican-bashing comments, some artisan has created Donald Trump piñatas so that outraged folks can hang him and hit him with a stick. If I were Trump, I'd be pissed that the hair on the piñata looks more realistic than the hair on my head.
A few friends of mine are worried that Trump, who's currently polling in second place, might get the Republican nomination. I don't know why they're fretting because, first of all, if he did get it, he might well be the easiest of all the contenders to defeat. He has no experience in governing and no real plans to fix any of the things he says he's going to fix. I think a certain part of the population finds Trump amusing and wants him in the race because he insults those they'd like to see insulted…but they're not about to entrust their country to him.
Second of all, I don't believe he's going to get the Republican nomination. Yeah, he's running second behind Jeb Bush but so what? There was a point in the last election when Herman Cain was in first place and then a week or so when Michele Bachmann was in the lead. Newt Gingrich even at one point announced in all seriousness that he had the nomination sewed-up. This far before the actual voting, the voters have plenty of time to tell pollsters anything off the tops of their heads. They're still deciding who they like…or dislike the least.
It matters not that The Donald is in second place. Second place is 10% of Republican voters and he also has, in a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 74 percent of Republican primary voters saying they could not support him. How do you win the nomination with an unfavorable rating like that? I'm not even sure Barack Obama has a 74 percent unfavorable rating with Republicans.
Trump has the name recognition amidst a field of contenders who aren't too well known. Of course he's going to do well now but he'll fade. The idea that he could win the presidency just on his name with no experience in government is ridiculous. That would be like Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor of —
Oh, wait a minute…
Today's Video Link
Stephen Colbert decided to warm up for his big CBS debut by hosting an episode of a public access TV show in Monroe, Michigan…
Live Humbug
Just before Christmas of 2008, some friends took me to a play that will linger forever in my memory as the biggest disaster I ever saw on a stage. What follows is the review I posted here on December 23 of that year and it was one of the most-read things I ever put up there. Why? Because the Los Angeles Times in its review of the show linked to this as a kind of independent corroboration of what they said. Amazingly, the producer of this show tried to mount another production of A Christmas Carol in another city the following year with a different all-star cast but it never opened because, among other reasons, some of the stars he advertised hadn't agreed to be in it. Here's what resulted when he tried it in '08…
There are evenings in the theater and there are evenings in the theater. Last night, I had an evening in the theater. My friends Paul Dini and Misty Lee had an extra ticket for the opening of a new production of Mr. Dickens's A Christmas Carol at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood — the same venue where the Academy Awards are held. It was to star Christopher Lloyd as Scrooge, supported by John Goodman, Jane Leeves and Jane Seymour with "A Special Appearance by" Gene Wilder. Unmentioned in most of the advertising was that Mr. Wilder would not be there; that his performance would be handled by a pre-recorded hologram.
Several years ago, some actors I knew wrote a play about a play where everything that could go wrong on stage went wrong on stage. It was called Footlight Frenzy and it was quite hilarious. Alas, in one of those coincidences that haunt the entertainment business, it came out almost simultaneously with another play about a play where everything that could go wrong on stage went wrong on stage. It was called Noises Off, and it was a bigger hit to the point where few people saw Footlight Frenzy…a shame since it was the funnier of the two screw-up plays.
It's now in second place with Noises Off in third. Opening night of A Christmas Carol at the Kodak, so many things went wrong that the audience couldn't keep from laughing and ultimately, neither could the actors.
Our first inkling that things would be far from perfect came when we sat down in the theater and opened our program books. Out tumbled one of those little slips that told you there'd be a cast substitution. This one was unusually chatty and I quote it in full…
The role of Christmas Past is now played by Jane Noseworthy.
Jane Seymour had to withdraw from the play after contracting a severe bronchial inflection. She felt that she wouldn't be able to perform to the best of her abilities and be able to give the audiences 100% while suffering this illness. The producers and Jane agreed that it would be in the best interest of all parties for her not to continue with the production.
We all sighed and remarked on how the producers had done a good job of more or less keeping this a secret until we were inside and seated. (Ms. Seymour's name was still on all the posters all over the Kodak Theater.) We also noted the irony of an actress named Jane withdrawing because of a respiratory problem and being replaced by an actress named Jane Noseworthy.
Under the first announcement, on the same slip of paper, we also learned…
The role of Marley is now played by Barry Cutler.
Gene Wilder was to have appeared as a special effect using a hologram; the producers decided that it would not be effective in the production.
This was probably the first time much of the audience learned that Gene Wilder was never going to be on the stage at the Kodak at all…and now, even his hologram wasn't going to be there. In light of what happened later, it's pretty obvious of the reason: They simply couldn't make the hologram work.
Another ominous sign: A Christmas Carol is set in the Victorian era. Someone might have kept that in mind when they picked out the music being played before the play commenced. It was "Santa Baby" by Eartha Kitt. (During intermission, we got "The Most Wonderful Time" by Andy Williams.)
Then the show started and so did the problems. Most of them were the fault of the tech crew. A pre-recorded narration, using passages from Dickens, was supposed to cover each scene change but they were rarely able to get the sets placed during the allotted time. Time after time, the curtain came down on a scene, the voiceover would play…and then it would finish and we'd sit there staring at a curtain for a minute or two while the crew raced to get a set set up. Finally, the curtain would rise…and sometimes it would then come down again because the stagehands were still out there arranging things. Or sometimes, they'd dart off the stage.
One time, they started playing the narration while Christopher Lloyd and the Ghost of Christmas Past were still on stage with another minute of dialogue to go before the scene change. Twice, they brought in the wrong backdrop…and only brought it in halfway. Some scene pieces were in the wrong place and you could see actors scrambling to get on and off stage because entrances and exits weren't where they were supposed to be.
In the first act, there's a scene where Scrooge returns to his home and he's supposed to see an image of his deceased partner, Jacob Marley, on the knocker on the front door. I guess this was going to be done via some sort of projection but we never saw it. When the stage crew set the scene, they left the front door wide open.
There was a long wait and you could hear whispering in the wings, which I guess was because they were trying to figure out what to do about this. The decision was to press ahead, so Mr. Lloyd entered and muttered some incomprehensible ad-lib dialogue about Marley, then entered the house. Apparently thinking his microphone was now off (it wasn't), he began to complain to someone backstage, "The door was open!"
And on it went. Things began to get a little better in the second act. John Goodman made his entrance as the Ghost of Christmas Present and got a tremendous ovation. Through sheer energy, he began to elevate the proceedings…but then we had a series of missed cues and some forgotten lines and we were back into a live Bloopers show. Christopher Lloyd did a magnificent job of pretending all was normal and carrying on but by the last few scenes, even he couldn't deny the obvious.
After the ghosts renovate Scrooge's soul, there's a moment when he needs to get out of his nightshirt and into his street clothes hurriedly. Lloyd dashed behind a screen to change and suddenly, there came the loud and unmistakable sound of modern-day Velcro® and a burst of laughter from the audience. You could hear Christopher Lloyd giggling and also struggling with the costume change…and finally, he announced, "If I didn't know better, I'd think the spirits were screwing with my clothes!"
For the rest of the play, everyone was snickering and Mr. Lloyd — sounding less and less like Ebenezer Scrooge and more and more like the Right Reverend Jim Ignatowski — was doing body language and gestures that said to the audience, "Yeah, I know…let's just get through it." There was much laughter in places that should not have evoked laughter. At the end, he and the cast got a tremendous standing ovation for sheer persistence and courage under fire. Lesser performers would have walked off the stage in mid-performance, headed across the promenade to the food court and applied for jobs at Hot-Dog-on-a-Stick.
This was the first of fourteen performances through January 4 and I assume things will get better. They'd pretty much have to. Christopher Lloyd is a fine actor and if he'd had half a chance to be as even half as good as he could be, he'd probably have been quite good…right up there with great Scrooges of the past like Alastair Sim and Quincy Magoo.
There could even be a memorable performance in this production. As it was, the first night was memorable but not in the way that was intended. As we exited, the audience was still chuckling and itemizing the errors. I overheard one gent ask his companion, "Was there anyone who didn't screw up?" The answer was, "Yes…Jane Seymour."
Today on Stu's Show!
Court is in session on today's Stu's Show — and since the Attorney for the Defense is Perry Mason, you know the defendant is innocent and by the end of the trial, some witness or spectator is the courtroom is going to break down and admit that he or she was the real murderer and that they had to do it. For years, America lived for that moment as they watched a legendary TV show produced and sometimes directed by Stu's guest today, Arthur Marks. Arthur actually did a lot more than just Perry Mason. He was involved with a number of movies and I hope they'll have time for him to talk about them…but the main topic will be Perry Mason. Also in the studio will be Jim Davidson, who has recently authored an incredible and exhaustive book on the history of Erle Stanley Gardner's most lasting creation. You can order that book on Kindle only here and if you're interested in the topic, I suggest you do.
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 to three or beyond. Shortly after a show ends, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a measly 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three. Your witness, Mr. Mason.
My Latest Tweet
- Rand Paul met today with anti-gov't rancher Cliven Bundy. He tried to persuade Bundy to endorse Jeb Bush and Scott Walker.
Food, Glorious Food
November 17, 2008 is when this first appeared here. Not much to add to it except to note that Vito's still has the best pizza in Los Angeles…
I often cruise restaurant review boards, not so much for the food info as the sheer drama of the arguments. It's fun to see people debate something as inconsequential as where to get the best veal marsala…and it can give you insight into the illogical ways in which some people bicker. You can observe the same silly tricks of evasion and myopia that they then apply on other forums to mud-wrestle over important stuff like abortion, guns, Iraq or Best Episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show.
People really like to argue food. Someone once told me, and I think it's true, that the best way to get information on a restaurant chat board is not to ask a question but to start a brawl. Let us say you'll be travelling to Jerkwater, Alabama and you want to know where to get great ribs. You will learn little if you just post a query that says, "Hey, could someone suggest some good places to get ribs in Jerkwater?" Instead, you should do the following. Google "Jerkwater AND ribs" and get the name of any rib joint in the area. Let's say it's Murray's BBQ. Then under some anonymous handle, you post, "Had dinner the other night at Murray's. Boy, that's the best 'Q within a hundred miles of Jerkwater and anyone who'd eat ribs anywhere else is an idiot with no taste."
That will get you plenty of insults but it'll also get you plenty of recommendations.
Another thing that amuses me is that there is little recognition that restaurants can vary from day to day, meal to meal, even hamburger to hamburger. If you write from the heart, "Rosie's Cafe is great. I had the best hamburger of my life there," someone will feel the need to debate this. It will be like, "That's ridiculous. I had a hot turkey sandwich three years ago at Rosie's that was terrible." People like to believe that their favorites are consistently good and that once a restaurant has done wrong, it cannot possibly do right.
A subset of that is something I call The Latke Rule. It flows from the widespread belief among us Jews that the way your mother made potato pancakes is the only correct way to make potato pancakes, and that all future potato pancakes you encounter are to be judged not on their own merits but as to how much or how little they deviate from The Way Mom Made Them. In truth, you can apply this to any kind of food, even when your mother was a lousy cook. But her goal was always correct…so if she put American Cheese atop your tuna noodle casserole, then a tuna noodle casserole with, say, Cheddar is just wrong.
Lastly, one thing that has always fascinated me about restaurant discussions is that while people can debate anything edible, there are seven categories that seem to draw blood. Those seven are…
- Hamburgers
- Pizza
- Chinese Food
- Barbecue (ribs, especially)
- Philly Steak Sandwiches
- Hot Dogs
- Clam Chowder
People do quarrel over where to get the best Prime Rib or Tostadas but they do so in a civil and calm manner. These seven seem to bring out the shrill and vituperative disagreements.
Sometimes, pronouncements are geographic — the only decent pizza is in New York, you can't get a good hot dog outside Chicago, etc. Debates about Philly Steak Sandwiches usually start with the understanding that the best are in Philadelphia and then they diverge into sub-topics (Where in Philly? Anywhere outside of Philly worth a mention? And what about Cheez Whiz?) Just outside Los Angeles, there's a community called Monterey Park that is famous for a cluster of superior and authentic Chinese Restaurants. There are Angelenos who will karate-chop you if you suggest that any Chinese Food from anywhere in California but Monterey Park is fit for human consumption.
The Great Clam Chowder Controversy is probably the most interesting one. I have seen death threats hurled over the question of white versus red, let alone where one might procure the finest of either. Years after we finally bury the issue of race in this country, foodies will still be wrestling with that color question.
I was going to end this by posting my list of places I like in L.A. for the above seven but I got enough hate mail during the recent election. So let us all live in peace. Let us link hands, respect our divergences of opinion and recognize that just as people are different, tastes are different and there is no right or wrong answer to any of this. And then let's go beat the crap out of anyone who thinks Vito's on La Cienega doesn't make the best pizza in Los Angeles. Thank you.
My Latest Tweet
- The new definition of Religious Freedom: The freedom from having to live in a world that isn't run in strict accord with your religion.
Briefly Noted
You notice how every time I say I won't be posting the rest of the day unless I have to post an obit, I do? I'm going to stop taking days off…
Leonard Starr, R.I.P.
The fine comic strip writer-artist Leonard Starr died today at the age of 89. He did a great many things in his day but is probably best known for the newspaper strip, Mary Perkins On Stage and for taking over the Annie (aka Little Orphan Annie) feature, as well as his work on the ThunderCats cartoon series.
Starr was born in New York where he attended Manhattan's High School of Music and Art followed by Pratt Institute. It was while he was studying at Pratt that he began working in the earliest comics books, more or less around 1942. His first accounts seem to have been with Harry "A" Chesler and Funnies, Incorporated but before long, he was drawing and occasionally writing for all the major New York publishers including Timely (now Marvel), Fawcett, A.C.G., E.C. and DC, plus he was a frequent contributor to comics produced by the Simon and Kirby studio. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby both considered him a first-rate talent.
Around 1955, as business began faltering in comic books, Starr began assisting on various newspaper strips and working harder on a long-held dream to have one of his own. In 1957, he achieved it with the debut of On Stage. Some newspapers billed it as Mary Perkins (the title character) and some called it Mary Perkins On Stage and that eventually became its official name. The strip was very popular with the public and much admired by his peers. The National Cartoonists Society gave it awards in 1960 and 1963 and then gave Starr their prestigious Reuben Award in 1965.
The strip lasted until 1979 when he dropped it and instead took over writing and drawing Annie, putting a fresh spin on Harold Gray's long-running feature. Some comic strip scholars will argue this but I always thought Gray's strip was an unreadable bore but Starr's take on it was quite wonderful. Still, Annie's time had passed and while he built up the following on a fading property for a time, it eventually lost enough subscribing papers that Starr gave it up in 2000 when he more or less retired.
In the meantime, he'd begun writing scripts for animation and was the main showrunner for ThunderCats, a popular cartoon series produced in the late eighties. He also, in tandem with fellow strip artist Stan Drake, created a series of popular graphic novels named for their title character, Kelly Green.
As noted, Starr was widely admired by his fellow cartoonists. His Mary Perkins strips are currently being reprinted in a series of books which I highly recommend. He was truly one of the greats and it's always sad to lose one of those.
Mushroom Soup Tuesday
I keep starting and aborting posts about the fallout from last week's Supreme Court gamechangers. Too many people are writing and talking about it for me to have an original thought, plus I have a comic book script that's due. So I'm putting up another of my unique soup can graphics and taking a break from blogging for the rest of the day. If, as too often happens, I have to to come back to do an obit, I will. But otherwise, this is all you're getting here for a while.
I will note that Chris Christie has — surprise, surprise — announced his candidacy, therefore increasing the number of folks who'll get no more electoral votes than I.
Also: I am all for "religious freedom" as I understand it. But I'm starting to get real tired of folks who seem to define it as the freedom from having to live in a world that isn't run in strict accord with their religion.
I'll be back soon.
Today's Video Link
Last Wednesday, I was a guest on Stu's Show and the topic was Late Night Television. We started with a discussion of Mr. Letterman's departure, then began slogging through the history of that time slot, starting with Broadway Open House. That episode of Stu's Show lasted three and a half hours (!) and we only made it up to the early years of Carson.
We shall continue the topic on some future episode but in the meantime, if you'd like to listen to what we said ("we" being Stu, me and his resident TV critic-historians, Steve Beverly and Wesley Hyatt), you can download the program from the Stu's Show Archives for a measly 99 cents…but don't do that. Make it one of four shows you order and you'll get them for the price of three. I highly recommend Stu's past interviews with Shelley Berman, Jonathan Winters, Dick Van Dyke, Carl Reiner and many, many others.
One thing we talked about last Wednesday was the six month transition between the time Jack Paar left The Tonight Show and Johnny Carson started. Why this happened was explained on this site back here and I also listed the interim guest hosts who included Art Linkletter, Soupy Sales, Merv Griffin, Groucho Marx and others. Jerry Lewis hosted one week and it led to ABC offering him his own talk show, which turned out to be a two-hour live flop on Saturday nights.
I said in that piece and I said on Stu's Show that all those shows were probably lost. I knew of only about eight minutes of one of the Jerry Lewis episodes that had survived. Then a listener wrote in — I'm sorry I don't have his or her name — to say that the entirety of that episode was not only not lost but was on YouTube! I have placed its five parts into the player below. The guests are Jack Carter, Nancy Dussault and Henry Gibson. Skitch Henderson came in in to replace Jose Melis (Paar's bandleader) to lead the NBC Orchestra but Paar's announcer, Hugh Downs, stuck around to announce for the temps. I believe they're working on a slightly redecorated version of Paar's set.
Before you click: Remember that in those days, The Tonight Show was an hour and 45 minutes long. Since some stations aired a 15 minute newscast at 11 PM then and some had a 30-minute newscast, Tonight was configured to accommodate both. The show would start at 11:15 and they'd billboard the guests and introduce the host…and then at 11:30, the show would start again and they'd billboard the guests and introduce the host. You'll see the two openings on this video.
I believe the show was only called Tonight during the Steve Allen and Paar eras but was sometimes referred to casually as The Tonight Show. It doesn't seem to have been until the fill-in shows began that it became officially The Tonight Show. Art Linkletter was the first of the guest hosts so if you wanted to split follicles, you could say Linkletter was the first host of The Tonight Show. (Paar's version, as I understand it, started as Tonight, then became The Jack Paar Show for a time. When he announced his retirement, NBC decided to re-establish the Tonight name and the show became The Jack Paar Tonight Show for the remainder of his run.)
Here's the whole show. It's interesting that with 105 minutes to fill, they didn't book more guests…and bigger ones. Nancy Dussault, who had taken over the lead in The Sound of Music on Broadway, was not hugely famous. Henry Gibson, several years from appearing on Laugh-In, was largely unknown. The loose, "we don't know what we're doing" style is fairly typical of late night TV in those days…
This is in five parts which should play one after the other in this viewer. That's assuming I've configured things correctly, which is always assuming a helluva lot…
Today's Post on Gay Marriage
If you wish I'd stop writing about this, fear not. I will…and way sooner than Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum will stop using it to raise funds, promising a Constitutional Amendment that will never get anywhere. Those who think it will do not realize how much of the country you have to have on your side to amend the constitution.
I continue to be fascinated by how feeble the argument against Gay Marriage turned out to be when thrust into courts of law. On talk shows and at parties, its opponents could insist that "God is against it" and "We all know it's wrong" and other insistences that are inadmissible before a judge. It pretty much came down to a claim that allow gays to wed would have some vague, impossible-to-prove adverse impact on Straight Marriage…or be bad for any children who were birthed as a result of Adam marrying Steve.
On the children issue, they made some claims that might have had a place in an argument for Gay Adoption…but very few people who oppose Gay Marriage seem to care one way or the other about Gay Adoption. They also don't care enough about kids being raised by two loving heterosexual parents to do anything about the high divorce rate among straights. It's only gay people who have to sacrifice for the children.
If you're still rankled about the decision, I suggest you seek out and actually read some of the arguments from various states and also from the Supreme Court that led to judges ruling that same-gender wedlock could not be outlawed. Stripped of all that "God Stuff," the case was pretty empty. I keep looking for a good one.
One of my favorite political writers, Jonathan Chait, thinks Conservative Super-Columnist Ross Douthat is the best that side has to offer and that Douthat's arguments are almost vaporware. If you come across a stronger case that doesn't rely on "Because the Bible says so," please let me know.