Ah, we're nearing the end of David Letterman's long and amazing tenure on The Late Show. This article says what I've been hearing from folks closer to the situation: That Dave intends to wind down his time there without a lot of hoopla. A friend at CBS told me that the network would have liked the final weeks to be loaded with Big Stars, regardless of how close those people were to Dave and his show, but Dave is going to book his favorite guests and that while some may be Big Stars, that's not the criteria.
No word on if or when Jay Leno might be in the guest chair. A person I'll just describe as a decent source says that he assumes Dave desires some closure and healing with that feud so that's why Jay might be on. A reason he might not be on is that Jay is very busy since he left The Tonight Show with a new cable series and dozens of stand-up appearances and guest shots lined up. Dave, my friend says, might not like the contrast as he has nothing planned and can't seem to find anything that he wants to do now.
A lot of folks seem to be under the impression that Johnny Carson made a decision that once he retired, he would never appear on TV again except for the few brief cameos that he did. That wasn't it. When Johnny left his late night job, he had every intention of doing something else. He just didn't know what it would be…and never found anything that didn't feel like a giant step down. Johnny had been in the position to observe many one-time Superstars whose main source of fame atrophied and who were reduced to doing anything just to get in front of a camera.
He didn't want to be one of those people but he also didn't want to spend the rest of his life playing tennis. I sure get the feeling that's the problem for Dave: What do you do? Do you start all over at the bottom with some other kind of show? Do you risk devaluing your rep by doing something that might be a disaster? Personally, I'd love to see Letterman do a one-on-one interview show with the kind of guests he really likes…but I have no idea where that might go on what schedule.
In other news: Have I mentioned that I canceled my TiVo Season Pass for James Corden's show? As with Jimmy Fallon, I like the guy but I don't find his program interesting. I'll tune in when I see a guest I like but there doesn't seem to be one in the next week or two. I really want to have a late night program I look forward to and at the moment, the only one is The Daily Show…and that may or may not remain one with the next host. I'm counting on you, Stephen.
Here's an excerpt — unaired, I believe — from John Oliver's interview last week with Edward Snowden. In it, the discuss what's a safe password to use in the age of computers…
I don't know a lot about this topic but I do know that no matter what someone tells you would be a safe password, there's some other so-called expert who'll tell you that it would be a pushover for someone to crack. Snowden suggested "MargaretThatcheris110%SEXY." This fellow says that even leaving aside the fact that Snowden mentioned it on TV, that's not very secure at all. He says to assume that a would-be cracker would be capable of one trillion guesses a second.
I went to this site which evaluates how difficult a password is to guess and I entered Snowden's example. The site calculates that at one hundred trillion guesses per second, cracking that one could take 8.47 thousand trillion trillion centuries. If someone wants to wait that long to get into my GMail account, they're welcome to anything they can find in there.
What's interesting is that if Mr. Snowden merely added an easy-to-remember exclamation point to the end of this phrase, it becomes astronomically harder to guess. Instead of 8.47 thousand trillion trillion centuries, it would take 8.04 hundred thousand trillion trillion centuries. Two exclamation points make it 76.43 million trillion trillion centuries and five make it 65.53 trillion trillion trillion centuries. I'm sure someone will tell us that's not good enough.
Gary Owens left us in the middle of February. This afternoon, a tiny percentage of his friends attended a memorial gathering. As the emcee John Rappaport remarked, they couldn't have let all of Gary's friends in because the Coliseum was booked. I'm not sure even that place would have held them all.
It was a nice, intimate celebration. Gary's sons Scott and Chris spoke. His beloved wife Arleta spoke. And then came the friends and co-workers.
Some of us who spoke or were present wrote for Gary's radio show when we were starting out, then went on to careers in television and elsewhere. John Rappaport, who was one of Gary's closest friends, has had a very impressive career and he was a very impressive host, introducing — in this order — Monty Aidem, George Schlatter, Joanne Worley, Ben Fong-Torres, me, Fred Willard and Arnie Kogen.
You know Fred Willard and you probably know that George produced Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and that Joanne was a cast member. Ben Fong-Torres was a friend of Gary's for fifty years and he got a huge laugh with the opening line of his speech. He said, "Even though I work for Rolling Stone, what I'm going to tell you is true." The rest of us are comedy writers. Here's what I said, following a montage of Gary's work in animation…
You just saw a tiny sampling of the hundreds of cartoons in which Gary's familiar and friendly tones were heard. True, Mel Blanc probably did more but Mel cheated a little. Mel had nine hundred and ninety-nine more voices than Gary did. Gary got hired for his one great one.
Gary was heard on dozens of shows — and what's interesting is that not only did all those characters sound like Gary but a few of them even looked like him. There were commercials for Flintstones cereals directed by his friend Scott Shaw! here with Gary essentially playing himself. It looked just like him except that he was barefoot, wearing a mastodon skin and the hand over his ear only had four fingers.
Oh — and you know how in the Flintstones world, everyone's name has to have a rock pun in it? Well, the name didn't get into the commercials but on the model sheets, it said that he was Quarry Owens.
Now, in the midst of all this praise, I think someone ought to tell you something they didn't like about Gary. I didn't like how modest he was. It's just not right to be that good and that beloved and not be at least a little arrogant.
When Gary showed up for one of our breakfast gatherings or a Yarmy's Army meeting or a lunch, we'd all say things like, "Hey, Gary! What's wrong? I just heard someone doing a voiceover and it wasn't you." This is how you know you've really made it in this business: When the only thing your friends can find to ridicule you about is that you have way too much work.
And Gary would always say, "Well, I've been lucky." No. Nobody is that lucky. Nobody works all the time unless they're the absolute best at what they do. Okay, maybe Will Ferrell. But nobody else.
Here's why Gary worked so much. Those of us who cast and direct voices live in constant fear of something. It's when the person above us — the producer, the sponsor, the network, whoever it is — says, "Why did you hire that jerk?" No one ever got in trouble hiring Gary. Ever. He was the safest casting selection you could possibly make.
He was always on time. Actually, he was always early and he never complained about anything. If you asked him to read the copy fifty-seven times, he read it fifty-seven times even though he knew the first one was fine and you'd probably wind up using Take Three. He made it so easy for everyone on the other side of the glass. Here's how you directed Gary…
"Hi, Gary. Here's the copy. Use that microphone. All right, let's roll tape…"
[SHORT PAUSE]
"Great. Let's do one more for protection."
[SHORT PAUSE]
"Perfect. Thanks, Gary!"
The man was so good at voice over that he even became a direction that was given to other announcers and voice actors on those rare occasions when someone else got a job. More than once, I heard a director tell someone, "Do that line again and try to give it a little Gary Owens."
That meant, "Put a little more smile in the voice. We want to like the announcer more."
Still, as impressed as I was by Gary at a microphone, I think I was more impressed with Gary not at a microphone.
I met him in 1970. I recognized him in the old Collectors Bookshop up on Hollywood Boulevard and we stood there and talked about comic books for about an hour — until he had to hurry off to KMPC and talk to everyone else in Los Angeles. He was disarmingly polite and friendly and funny and this is not a brag on my part because he treated everyone that way. Everyone in this room. Everyone he met. Even people he probably didn't like or at least shouldn't have.
Working with him was always so educational. Not only could you learn about how to be funny…you could also learn a little something about being a truly good, decent human being.
Like most of us, I haven't really mastered it either but I think I know the secret. Be generous with your time. Treat everyone with respect. No matter how poorly you may feel at a given moment, give everyone a smile and a kind word…and whenever possible, make it a funny one.
In other words: As you go through life…as you meet people…always try to give it a little Gary Owens.
The best line of the afternoon was probably Arnie Kogen's. He itemized a list of favors that Gary had done for members of the Kogen household, many of whom are in the entertainment industry. Then he concluded, "I realized Gary's done more for my family than I have."
Well actually, Gary got the biggest laugh. The ceremony concluded with the playing of this famous clip from one of his eighty zillion radio broadcasts…
It was a great afternoon. But then, how could a bunch of people talking about Gary not be a great afternoon? Boy, do we miss that guy.
We've been having a lot of police chases in Los Angeles lately. The other day, a man who was reportedly armed with a gun carjacked a taxicab and led police on a two-hour pursuit until large, armored SWAT trucks came in, spun the cab out and then surrounded him. Along the way, crowds gathered on sidewalks to cheer him on and a few citizens even ran up and high-fived the guy during the low-speed portions of the chase.
We'll probably never find out what, if anything, was on the fellow's mind. Of all the vehicles out there to carjack, why would you pick a lime green taxicab? Even if you didn't know that most cabs today are equipped with the kind of G.P.S. that makes them easily trackable, why would you want a car you couldn't sell and which was easily identifiable? Also, this particular cab was a Prius. That's a good auto for driving to the Whole Foods Market but it's not the ideal vehicle for trying to outrun police cars.
I suppose the answer is that nothing rational was on his mind. Fleeing from the cops is not a particularly rational act. Your chances of getting away are darn close to zero. Your chances of having a collision that will kill or injure you are considerably better.
We always hear the reporters covering these chases saying, "He probably figures he has nothing to lose." But of course, he has his life to lose. And once these guys are caught and taken into custody, we rarely hear much about who they are and why they might have done it. How many of them really were "three strikes" criminals who figured that once caught, they were going to the slammer for the rest of their lives? How many really had "nothing to lose" by running?
I wonder about that and I wonder about two other things. They can't all be irrational or stoned. How many of them are running just because they know that if they can evade the cops for ten or fifteen minutes, helicopters will magically appear above? How many like the idea that they'll be on most of the TV channels in the city for a few glorious minutes or even an hour or two?
And in a related wondering: How many think these days, "Well, I'm going to prison no matter what I do. I stand a better chance of not being shot if I'm on live TV when the cops take me in"?
Looks like I'm not going to have time today to post more than this. Hey, don't look at me like that. I posted plenty of content last week.
A couple of folks online are disputing my claim that Stan Freberg had the longest career of anyone who ever did cartoon voices. They say June Foray has been doing it longer. That would be true if you believe the earliest credits for June that are listed in the Internet Movie Database but I do not and at least when I co-authored her autobiography, June didn't either. Both Stan and June did their last cartoon voice work last year — in 2014. Stan, we know, did his first in 1945 for cartoons that were released in 1946.
There is some dispute over what June's first cartoon was. Her first inarguable credit was in Cinderella, which was released in 1950. I don't know when she recorded her part but it probably wasn't before 1948. There are three or four earlier cartoons in which people think they've heard her but I don't think any of them are her. To get a second opinion, I played some of them for her and she said, "That's not me."
Of course, June is still with us so it's not impossible she could do further work that would best Freberg's record. If she doesn't, it might be a long time before anyone else could. I can't think of a single other person currently doing cartoon voices who did them in the forties or fifties. There are a few from the mid-sixties. Perhaps around the year 2036, one of them will match Stan's longevity.
There have been an awful lot of articles posted online about Stan Freberg in the last few days. Here are a few…
"HeGeek" (who I think is someone named Ray Smotherman but I'm not sure) wrote about a thrilling encounter with Stan.
Sean Daniels, who works a lot in American theater, wrote a piece called "How I Learned Comedy (from Stan Freberg and sugar)."
Robert Lloyd has a good essay in the L.A. Times about the importance of Stan's work.
Sarah Kaplan of the Washington Post has another good piece.
Animation historian Don M. Yowp has some thoughts about Stan and some great old articles.
Lastly, his wife Hunter — who took such very good care of him — penned a poignant essay about their relationship. I got to know them pretty well and I have never seen another couple more in love.
Our pal Kliph Nesteroff has just posted an engaging interview with Dick Cavett. It's mostly about Cavett's days as a stand-up comedian and as a writer for The Tonight Show.
Last week on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, John Oliver interviewed Edward Snowden, mainly about the ability of the U.S. government to spy on male citizens' dick pics. The folks at Politifact fact-checked what Snowden said and they gave it a rating of Mostly True.
So: 34 or 35 years after he'd recorded Volume One of Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Stan Freberg began preparing to record Volume Two. I got to help…a little. Very little. I'll tell you in a moment how little.
One of the things I learned about Stan — and this is by no means a criticism — is that as a creative individual, he made up his mind how something should be and then he achieved it. When he produced advertising, his contracts often said something like, "Mr. Freberg shall be the sole judge of whether something is funny." If you hired Stan, he did what he did and you just had to accept it…or not.
I have worked with other people — some, very talented — who tried to create that kind of "my way or the highway" situation and it can be painful. It's bad enough to watch someone drive off the cliff but it's worse when there were people around who warned them…or still worse, were not allowed to. Somehow, doing it His Way, Stan managed to produce a stunning lifetime body of memorable work.
He was not insistent on His Way when he worked for others on their projects. When he came in to do voices on cartoon shows I voice-directed for example, he was totally cooperative and eager to please. He was also very good and his presence in the studio — and I am not kidding about this — made the other actors better. In the last few days since Stan left us, several of those actors have written to me to say how working with Stan Freberg was among the greatest thrills of their lives…and very, very educational.
However: On a Stan Freberg endeavor, everything had to be to the liking of Stan Freberg. I always thought one of the reasons he preferred radio to television was that he had more control in radio. With his gift for voices and ability to do multiple roles, it was easier to make things sound the way he wanted than to get them to look the way he wanted.
As I said above, I did very little, emphasis on the "very." This is a first-person narrative of my involvement because I was in a unique position to watch a master at work. If it sounds like I'm saying I deserve some credit for the resultant album, look closer. I did nothing that substantially affected the end-product. You couldn't. Stan Freberg making a Stan Freberg record was like Arnold Palmer playing golf. You could drive him to the golf course. You could carry his clubs. But he was the only one who was going to hit the ball.
His producer was his wife Donna, who had been the producer on just about everything he'd done for the past few decades. One of the reasons she was the ideal producer for him was that she made no attempt to interfere with content. I'll tell you in the next part some of the things she told me about what it was like to be Stan's producer but the main one was: "Stan has to make the record Stan wants to make the way he wants to make it."
Which is not to say he was not willing to question his own work, decide something wasn't right and change it…but he was going to be the one changing it. Most of the material for Volume Two of S.F.P.t.U.S.o.A. was written not long after he recorded Volume One. When it came time to at long last record it, Stan went back and rewrote a number of lines that seemed dated. With the hindsight of several decades, he also altered or discarded portions he no longer liked. The passing of time dictated other changes: He had tentatively cast all the roles with the same stock company he used on Volume One but some of those folks were no longer available.
The great Paul Frees had provided the super-authoritative voice of the Narrator. You may remember how he sounded…
Alas, the great Paul Frees was now the late Paul Frees. Stan wanted a sound-alike for consistency and was about 95% convinced no human being alive could properly replicate that voice. He said to me, "I may have to listen to Paul over and over and learn how to imitate that voice myself." In his youth, I'll bet Stan could have done it. He was an incredible mimic. But I told him I had The Guy.
When you go to Disneyland and ride Pirates of the Caribbean or visit The Haunted Mansion, you hear the original, ominous vocal stylings of Mr. Frees recorded way back when. But over the years as those attractions have changed, it was deemed necessary to change a few lines. The new lines were seamlessly inserted and they were done by Mr. Corey Burton.
At the time Stan asked me to help him make Volume Two happen, I was casting voices for a proposed (but ultimately unrealized) new cartoon show. I had already decided on Stan for one of the lead roles and had Corey in mind for another. I had to have them both come in and record audition material so that the Executive Producer could sign off on my selections so I scheduled them back-to-back. One afternoon, I recorded Stan and then asked to him to stick around as Corey arrived.
I think Stan was expecting that the guy I said could do a perfect Paul Frees would be older and scowling and would look like Orson Welles…or at least, Paul. Corey is a short, pleasant-looking younger fellow. When he arrived and I introduced him, Stan gave him a look of withering skepticism, then took me aside and said, "Are you sure he can sound like Paul?" I grinned like a guy with four aces: "Just listen!" (By the way, I am not claiming a lot of credit for this bit of casting. Anyone who knew anything about the current talent pool for voice actors would have known Corey was the go-to guy when you needed Paul Frees. It's just that Stan didn't.)
Corey went into the booth, got on the microphone and began warming up. I was on the other side of the glass, next to the audio engineer, and Stan was next to me. Over the speakers, we heard The Voice saying, "Stan Freberg…modestly presents…the United States of America." It sounded, of course, perfect and I turned to Stan, waiting for him to say, "My God, you were right!"
Instead, he said, "Okay, now I want to hear him." He thought he was listening to a reference recording of Paul Frees.
I said, "That is him." I pushed the button so Corey could hear me and asked him to do some different lines in the same voice. He said, still sounding exactly like Paul Frees, "Sure, Mark…what do you want me to say?"
That was when Stan said, "My God, you were right." In an interview later, he said, "When I realized it was him and not Paul, I got cold chills. I would have bet anything that was Paul." Here is Corey Burton on the final album…
See what I mean?
The three other major performers besides Stan on Volume One were Jesse White, Peter Leeds and Byron Kane. Back in 196whatever, Stan had designated major roles on Volume Two for all three of them but Byron had also died. Lorenzo Music filled his parts, and since I had voice-directed Lorenzo on Garfield cartoons — occasionally guest-starring Stan — everyone, including Lorenzo, assumed I had cast him. Nope. That was all Stan's doing.
Peter Leeds was alive and available. So was Jesse White but I'd worked with Jesse not long before on Garfield. I loved the guy so I will say this as politely as I can: He was not in good health and he was not up to the kind of performance Stan needed from him. Since I'd just been proven right about Corey, Stan trusted me on this. He gave Jesse a small cameo role on Volume Two and selected David Ogden Stiers to play the other parts for which Jesse had been penciled in.
It was very sad the day Jesse recorded. He was failing and it took many takes to get anything even remotely useable. One of our engineers said to Stan, "Guess you're going to have to have someone else redo that part."
Stan said, "No. Jesse was a big reason why Volume One was so successful. I want him to be a part of this one and besides, that may be Jesse's last performance and I'd never forgive myself if I threw away his last performance." It may indeed have been Jesse's last because he passed away not long after Volume Two was released and so did Peter Leeds.
From the original album, Stan also managed to bring back June Foray and there was one other cast member we couldn't find. Shepard Menken played a number of roles and was probably eager to be part of Volume Two. I say that because several years earlier, I'd directed him on an episode of Garfield and Friends and we'd talked about his involvement in S.F.P.t.U.S.o.A., which he said was one of the items on his résumé of which he was the proudest. He told me, "Stan keeps talking about recording Volume Two and I hope he calls me for it."
Unfortunately, when that time came, no one could locate Mr. Menken. After Donna gave up looking, I was assigned to track him down but his agent told me, as he'd told her, "I don't know where he is. Shep's kind of dropped off the face of the earth." Someone at the Screen Actors Guild told me, "If you find him, let us know. We have checks for him that came back to us marked 'No longer at this address.'" He was eventually located but not in time to be on Volume Two. He passed away in 1999.
Stan and Donna however assembled a fine ensemble to support the returning players. In addition to Peter Leeds, Lorenzo Music and David Ogden Stiers, they booked Naomi Lewis, William Woodson, Stan's son Donavan and his daughter Donna Jean. The investors and the folks at Rhino Records wanted some "star names" as cast insurance for a project they knew would be costly so Stan and Donna recruited Tyne Daly, Sherman Hemsley, John Goodman and Harry Shearer. All were folks who'd told Stan how much they loved Volume One. Billy May, who'd arranged and conducted the music for Volume One, went to work on Volume Two.
So with the script, cast and music in place, Stan Freberg finally did something that fans and friends had been urging him to do for thirty-five years. He went into a recording studio to record Volume Two of Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America. In what was very much a "dream come true" moment for me, I got to be there. In the next part, I'll tell you what I observed and how little I did.
As you'll see, my biggest contribution involved distracting Ray Bradbury who dropped by to urge Stan to insert some lines about how Bill Clinton was destroying the real United States of America. As you'll also see, even Stan's close friend Ray Bradbury couldn't persuade Stan to do anything Stan didn't want to do. Next time.
My pal Ken Levine complained about situation comedies — and this probably applies to other kinds of shows, though it's done most often with sitcoms — being sped up in syndication. He references this article over on Slate that shows you examples and lets you test to see if you can tell the difference.
I agree with everything Ken says…though I have to admit I didn't do so well on Slate's test. I'm also wondering if the speed-ups aren't the lesser of two bad choices, the other being to merely hack a minute or three out of the shows. No, I don't want to watch shows sped-up. I also don't want to watch them incomplete. If I absolutely have to pick between those two options, I think some speed-ups might be preferable to most editing.
Of course, picking from two bad choices always leaves you with a bad choice. There are a few other options which remain largely untried…
One is to run the shows uncut and unsped and just forget about this concept of half-hours. That would mean that after you roll in the requisite number of commercials, a show might start at 9:00 and end at 9:36 and the next one would start at 9:37. The entire schedule would be full of shows that began at 5:22 and 7:53 and rarely on the hour or half-hour. I'm not sure how viewers would take to this. Since I watch almost everything TiVoed, I'd be fine with it assuming the info on start/stop times made available to DVRs was precise. Given how often the times on ordinary broadcast television are off a minute or two, I'm skeptical this could be accomplished.
Another possibility is to let shows run their full, unsped length but to pad things out to round numbers. Years ago, someone announced they were going to do one of those classic sitcom channels and run everything uncut, including the credits. What they were going to do was to pad every 30-minute show to 45 with little interstitial segments. Like, they'd run a Dick Van Dyke Show at 10:00 and then a M*A*S*H at 10:45 and in-between, they'd have little spots where they'd interview people who worked on the shows and/or run clips of particularly golden moments.
They were confident viewers could cope with show starting fifteen and forty-five minutes after the hour. Well, maybe. But that idea never happened, I think because they found it too expensive to produce the filler material. I wonder though if viewers would have waited through those time-wasting segments or if they'd have started changing channels, looking for a real show that was starting now instead of in fifteen minutes.
Cartoon Network and its sister station Boomerang seem to do an amalgam of these two methods…but they, of course, have two advantages. One is that their library includes zillions of short cartoons of all different lengths. A sitcom network doesn't have loads of five-minute and seven-minute situation comedies. Also of course, a lot of their viewership is kids who've been parked in front of the set to watch whatever's on. It does not seem to affect their audience that the start times on so many of their shows are off a few minutes, either early or late.
Lastly, there's one other method which I don't think anyone has really tried: Fewer commercials. Run the shows with the number of ads they were originally intended to have.
This may sound akin to heresy but as streaming services become more plentiful and popular, regular ol' broadcast television is going to have to consider that as a way to compete. I wonder if anyone has tested something. Would viewers today pay more attention (or if they're watching on DVRs, not skip ahead) if commercial breaks were one minute as opposed to three or four? I sure don't watch many of the commercials in the shows I watch on MeTV or Antenna TV or other channels that run old shows.
I wonder what would happen if a station adopted a policy: Commercial breaks would be no longer than one minute during shows and two minutes between programs. It might take a while for viewers to get accustomed to that but once they did, might there be data to suggest that a commercial in a one-minute break on that station was two or three times more valuable than one buried in a three-minute break? I'll reach for my remote to jump through three minutes of ads. I might not bother to avoid one minute.
I dunno. I'm just throwing this out there. Maybe not enough folks watch on DVRs and know how to skip ahead…now. But that will probably change. If I were buying ad time during TV shows to sell my product, I might think it was worth paying a little more for an ad that fewer viewers were fast-forwarding through. Then again, I watch most of my favorite old TV shows via boxed sets of DVDs or Blu-Rays. That's really the answer to this whole problem.
Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this obituary misstated the year Mr. Freberg last did voice work for cartoons. It was 2014, not 2011.
That's one thing I like about the Times. They're really good about this kind of thing. I don't know any other newspaper — and certainly not any news program on TV — that is so diligent about atoning for that which they get wrong.
