Monthly Archives: February 2016

This article over at the Hollywood Reporter is headlined, "Bill Maher Pens Blistering Essay on Hillary as 'Charlie Brown,' Trump and Why Bernie Sanders, Socialist, Can Win."

Two things wrong with it, the first being that the article really doesn't have enough to do with Hollywood to warrant being in the Hollywood Reporter. Secondly, Maher didn't "pen" an essay. At the end of the piece, it says, "As told to Seth Abramovitch." So Maher gave an interview, folding in lots of lines he and his writers have come up with for his show and/or his stand-up act and this Seth person turned all that into an essay.

I have little respect for Mr. Maher when it comes to medical advice and his view of Muslims, which he continuously seems to be walking back to more moderate turf, is still a bit too Trump for me. But I agree with a lot of what this article says about Obama and Hillary and various other folks who either have lived in the White House or aspire to dwell within.

And I just got a text saying Carly Fiorina has dropped out of the presidential race. If Christie quits in the next hour or so, Stephen Colbert's staff has to drop whatever he's about to tape and furiously cobble up another Hunger Games parody.

Could the Republican Convention be a contested one where no candidate arrives with a lock on the nomination? Donald Devine explains how possible that is (somewhat) and how that would work (messy).

I'm beginning to think Trump may indeed get the nomination. The collapse of Marco Rubio in the last few days kills a lot of the scenarios one could imagine whereby Trump wouldn't be the nominee, as does the rumored — they're saying it could happen before the day is out — surrender of Chris Christie. But then again, Rubio's unexpected crash just reminds us how unexpected things do happen when one least expects. Tomorrow, we could find out that Trump actually did shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue. And the mounting inevitability of Trump will bring more talk of third party challenges, as well as more opposition research and advertising against him.

I continue to like Bernie Sanders and hear all this talk about how he can't win. I have trouble seeing how he can beat Hillary, especially if his New Hampshire win doesn't give him a mega-bump elsewhere. As Harry Enten notes, Sanders is currently running way behind in the next batch of primary states. I have a little less trouble imagining Sanders beating Trump if it comes to that…but we have a long way to go before it may come to that.

This is yet another 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, Part 2 can be read here, Part 3 can be read here, Part 4 can be read here and Part 5 can be read here. Onward…

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I was going to write about something else for this installment but I received an e-mail that had a sense of urgency about it…

Thank you for your articles about rejection but I am waiting for the one that would have the most relevance to my situation. How does one cope with the kind of rejection that makes you think you're wasting your time trying to be a writer at all?

I have been at it for almost eight years now and you would be horrified if I told you how little money I have made and how few pieces I have had selected for publication. In fact, most of what I've had published has been for publications that didn't pay and one or two that said they would but never did. I have had to support myself with a non-writing job and some nights, it is tough to sit down and pursue my first love after working all day at my damned pay-the-bills job.

I am not asking you for advice on how to get published so much as I'm asking you for advice on how to cope with not being published. I could use some help here.

Sure sounds like you could. Okay, keep in mind during what follows that I have no idea how good a writer you are. Your e-mail is the only thing you've written that I've ever read and that ain't enough to formulate an opinion. It is possible that what you're writing just plain isn't very good and that you're pursuing a goal for which you simply lack the necessary talent. That's possible and you know it.

As I've written here before, I am not a big believer in the philosophy, "Never give up on your dream. If you keep at it and never surrender, eventually you will make it." I believe the person who came up with that also used to invent "can't lose" strategies for the game of Roulette. In any game where there's a chance of winning, there's a chance of losing and in any profession that requires skill, there are those who just plain don't have enough of that skill.

And it might not be skill at writing that they're lacking. It might be skill at selling the work, which can be a separate but equally-necessary talent. Before you throw good years after bad, ask yourself if there's something else you could be happy doing…

…and for God's sake, don't make the mistake of judging your potential by someone else's. Don't think, "I'm a better writer than Harry and if he can sell his novel, I can certainly sell my novel." Harry could be an outlier or a fluke or maybe you're unaware that he's the nephew of a publisher. You're not competing with Harry. An editor is not going to read your manuscript and think, "Well, this is better than Harry's book and I bought that so I suppose I have to buy this."

It also may be that you're writing for the wrong marketplace…or maybe the wrong part of the right marketplace. Years ago, I met a fellow at Comic-Con who was trying to break into writing comic books. A writing teacher had told him, "Write what you're passionate about" and since he was passionate about Batman, he kept writing and submitting Batman stories. The problem with that? Everyone wants to write Batman.

The top writers in the business — folks much more "connected" than any outsider could be — were mud-wrestling to write Batman and the Batman editor at the time had so much interest from those guys that he never got around to even looking at submissions from unknowns. There was also a kind of sense that Superman, Batman and a few others were assignments that oughta go to the experienced writers; that one did not start by starting at the top.

This wanna-be Bat-writer may or may not have been writing superb scripts — I have no idea. But since no one was reading them, it really didn't matter.

I guess I'm not really answering your question, which was not about how to improve your chances of selling your writing but how to deal with getting nowhere. That's because I would deal with getting nowhere by trying a different route and maybe even a different destination. If you're not reaching your goals, maybe you need not to abandon your goals so much as expand them.

You may discover they're more expandable than you think. Once upon a time, there was a man named Bob Fosse who grew up wanting to be the new Gene Kelly and star in movie musicals the way Gene Kelly did. And if being a great dancer was all it took, he would have made it.

But he was a little short and he wasn't as handsome as Gene Kelly and he wasn't as good an actor as Gene Kelly and he didn't sing as well as Gene Kelly…and worst of all, he came along at a time when that kind of movie was becoming increasingly less commercial. They were making so few of them that even Gene Kelly was branching out into other things like dramatic roles and directing.

So this Fosse guy modified his goal. He segued from dancing to choreography and from choreography to directing…and there was a period there when he managed to be the most successful director in the business. In one year, he won an Emmy, an Oscar and a Tony. Can't do much better than that. He came to be very happy he hadn't become Gene Kelly because (a) there just wasn't a market for that anymore and (b) he realized directing suited him just fine and satisfied a lot of the same yearnings.

Don't think of modifying your dream as giving up or failing. Think of it as redirecting the same creative energies into more promising endeavors. If you've been trying to sell western short stories and tomorrow, most of the markets buying such material went out of business, it would not be an admission of defeat to say, "Hmm…I think I'll focus on detective stories instead."

Or romance. Or adventure. Or non-fiction. Or radio dramas. Or books instead of magazines. Or greeting cards. There are a lot of ways to make a living as a writer and if you're going to have any sort of career, you probably need to be proficient in and very happy doing a wide variety of them. My longevity — I'm sneaking up on 47 years of making a living almost wholly off freelance writing — has been based to a large extent on versatility. When no one is paying me to write one thing, I write something else. Maybe you need to write something else…or do something else. And soon.

Ezra Klein really, really, really, really, really, really doesn't like Donald Trump. And Donald's still better than Ted Cruz.

Our long Hebrew National nightmare is over: The Carnegie Deli in New York has reopened.

This runs an hour and 25 minutes but it's so funny, you may want to watch the whole thing. It's a 2016 Election Special starring Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. I kinda like the expressions on the faces of the political folks who, let's remember, aren't looking at the puppet so much as they're looking at Robert Smigel and his film crew — and wondering how to get through the encounter without looking too foolish…

I just stole the paragraph below from Josh Marshall's website because I thought it was worth quoting in full…

You'll hear a lot today about how since 1322 or whenever it is, only three men have lost the New Hampshire primary and gone on to be president. But definitely pay attention to who the three are: Clinton, Bush and Obama. In other words, the last three presidents, going back 24 years. So yeah, the New Hampshire primary ain't what it used to be.

And keep in mind that no matter who the nominees are, there's going to be some precedent-breaking. If the Democratic nominee is Hillary Clinton, you'll hear, "This country has never elected a woman president" If it's Bernie Sanders, you'll hear, "This country has never elected an admitted Democratic Socialist."

If the Republican nominee is Donald Trump, you'll hear, "This country has never elected a man with no experience in government or the military." If it's Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, you'll hear, "This country has never elected a person of Hispanic ancestry."

Just like not long ago, it was "This country has never elected a black man." There's a first time for everything except President Jim Gilmore.

I really don't know what to think of Marco Rubio. In the debate the other night, he froze up and kept repeating rehearsed lines, even in response to the accusation that all he could do was repeat rehearsed lines. As with Jeb Bush and that "please clap" line, I think it's possible to dwell too much on the little screw-ups and brain farts that candidates have when they're out there making speech after speech after speech after speech. I just haven't seen much of Rubio that suggests such moments are not the norm with him.

Far more damaging to me is how he falls in with this trend we're seeing of candidates making ridiculous, thoughtless promises as applause lines. Even if I was opposed to Obamacare and the Iran Deal, I would be horrified by pledges to repeal every word of them "on Day One of my presidency." Neither is something you can just do without endangering a lot of lives and creating chaos. Actions have consequences and I'm not impressed by any politician who makes a promise without addressing the consequences. Rubio does a lot of that.

But the oddest thing out of him lately is this: The other day, Rubio was pressing the flesh in a New Hampshire restaurant and he was confronted by a gay man who had heard Rubio's promises to appoint Supreme Court Justices who will make Gay Marriage illegal. The man challenged him on this and Senator Rubio said, "I just believe marriage is between one man and one woman."

A little more discussion ensued and then Rubio said, "I think that's what the law should be, and if you don't agree, you should have the law changed by the legislature."

Huh? It has been changed in New Hampshire…and it was changed long before the Supreme Court waded into this issue. Same-Sex Wedlock has been legal in that state since the beginning of 2010, due to legislation signed into law by the governor on June 3, 2009. How do you campaign in New Hampshire and not know that? Or at least know of the Supreme Court decision that made it unnecessary to have the law changed in any state?

When the gay man pointed that out, Rubio walked away. How did his man become a Senator?

Well, I've got another "must-TiVo" show each week. I thought the first installment of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee was terrific, maybe the best first episode I've seen from a comedy/satire series. It reruns several times before next Monday's second episode and I suggest you catch one of them. It was so topical that it may not be repeated after that. Jon Stewart once said that the problem with shows like his is that they have "the shelf life of potato salad."

Ms. Bee, of course, did outstanding work on Mr. Stewart's show. She's a very funny lady and my one slight disappointment in her debut show was that she disappeared from the final segment…a very penetrating (i.e., not nice but not unfair) look at what's happened with the Jeb Bush campaign. I think folks have made too much of that clip of Jeb finishing what was for him an almost-fiery speech and then having to ask the audience to "Please clap." It didn't seem as bad to me as some are making it out to be. It just seemed like his audience wasn't sure he had some to the end of his paragraph and that this might be the proper time to applaud. But the rest of the piece on Full Frontal seemed pretty much on-target.

I liked very much what Samantha Bee is doing but I worry that she's doing it on the wrong network in the wrong time slot. Comedy Central was unwise to let this one get away.

The passing of our friend Joe Alaskey led to a number of news stories that were a little confused or confusing. Joe was a voice of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, Sylvester, Marvin the Martian, etc. At times, he was probably the most frequent voice of certain characters but he was not the only voice of any of the characters originally done by Mel Blanc. Since Mel left us, at least twenty different actors have spoken for all those animated superstars.

Why not one guy? Or at least, one guy for each character? There are two reasons, one being that if no one has a lock on any one role, it makes it harder for that one person to demand a whole lot o' money for any particular gig. Mel did that the last decade or two of his career. They weren't paying him residuals for the eleven-millionth rerun of What's Opera, Doc? so when they needed him to speak for Bugs in a new Kool-Aid commercial, he adjusted his fees upwards…and good for him.

They paid him well because he was Mel Blanc and it seemed so wrong — and possibly injurious to the properties — to get somebody else. It doesn't feel equally wrong to cast one guy who wasn't Mel to speak for Bugs instead of a different guy who also isn't Mel. So money is one reason.

Also, there is no one person at Warner's who makes all the decisions on this kind of thing. One person producing a cartoon may think Jeff Bergman does the best Bugs. Another one who's in charge of a Bugs Bunny videogame may think Billy West does a better Bugs while down the hall, someone supervising a commercial with Bugs in it may favor someone else. My late friend Greg Burson, who did Bugs an awful lot before he left us, used to complain incessantly about how he had to constantly audition for the same parts: "I did eighteen jobs for them as Bugs last month but I still have to go in today and read for the job for a different boss."

Joe endured a lot of that. He seems to have done Daffy more than anyone else but for example, in Space Jam, it was Dee Bradley Baker. (As you may have noticed, some of the folks making the casting decisions have very different ideas of what some of these characters should sound like. On one of my panels, Joe once demonstrated a couple of variations in Daffy's voice. Some directors, he explained, wanted the duck to have the voice Mel gave in the 1940's, whereas some wanted the way Mel did him in the sixties.)

I don't think this is a great way to handle this and when I've discussed it with actors or those who do the hiring, none of them seem to, either. But that's how they do it. Disney tends to have one official voice for their characters at a time but at Warner's, it's always a jump ball.

I have writing which must be written — the paying kind, not the fun blogging kind. Well, the paying kind is fun too but in a different way. So the rest of Monday, blogging here may be on the light side.

I do want to mention that I'm prepping some fine panels for this year's WonderCon, which is being held in Los Angeles at the L.A. Convention Center. I do not like this building but I will brave it for WonderCon. I'll tell you about them when the time comes but if you're wondering which days to go, you might want to know that we'll be playing Quick Draw! on Saturday morning and I'll host a Cartoon Voices panel later that afternoon. Badges for the con are still available but that may stop being true at some point before the convention.

Two weeks ago, we moved this blog to another server with a larger capacity and more bells and whistles. This has resulted in — so far — no crashes, and many readers have reported that the blog is three to five time as fast in loading. We just made another tech upgrade which should make it even faster for some of you.

These improvements have come with an increased price and for the first time since we started this site in 2000, it is costing us more to operate than we take in via tips and Amazon commissions. I am not asking for more tips but if you do purchase anything from Amazon, please use one of our links (like the red one in the right-hand column) to get you there. It won't cost you any more but we get a little cut on anything you purchase there. End of commercial.

Tonight on TV: We're looking forward to the first episode of Samantha Bee's new show. And Get TV is running Dick Van Dyke and the Other Woman, the 1969 TV special that reunited Mr. Van Dyke with Mary Tyler Moore and which showcased her so well that it led to her popular situation comedy the following year. If you get Get TV, get it. See you later.

It's been a while since we mentioned the musical version of The Nutty Professor, based on the Jerry Lewis movie and directed for the stage by that same gentleman. As you may recall, Jer kept announcing it would open on Broadway on such-and-such a date…and he seemed to be the only person who thought that. Eventually, the show had a brief tryout run in Nashville in 2012, followed by Jerry again proclaiming it would open momentarily in Manhatttan…but it didn't.

Well, The Nutty Professor is finally going to play New York…for one night. A staged concert version will be presented at Birdland (which is a music venue, not an actual theater) on February 15. Will this snowball into an actual, full-scale production? I doubt it…but I won't be sure it won't until I hear Jerry announce that it definitely will.

For those of you haven't seen the controversial George Lucas interview…

Once again, my Super Bowl prediction was correct: I did not watch the game. I have somehow never been able to generate the slightest interest in football.

I finally blocked him but I used to have a guy who e-mailed me every time I wrote anything even vaguely political to call me a dirty, unAmerican commie Jew Bastard who prays nightly for the destruction of this country. He even sent those messages when I said something negative about a Democrat because it was never negative enough for him. Anyway, in one of his tirades, he wrote — to cast aspersions on my patriotism — "You probably don't even follow football!"

And I thought, "Finally, this guy is right about something!"

Anyway, I did watch a little of the Republican Debate the other night. I don't think any of these things are really "debates" so much as they're synchronized stump speeches interrupted occasionally by questions. It seemed to me that the only ones who did themselves much good were Chris Christie and maybe Jeb Bush, neither of whom is likely to place first in any state for a long time, if ever. That would include their home states. But then I still think this election is going to have a lot more twists than most folks now imagine.

What I'd like to see in these "debates" is for them to all end with one question: "Candidates…suppose you do not get your party's nomination. Is there anyone at one of the other podiums you would not support for the presidency — and not just as the lesser of two evils?" I'm not sure if it would result in more or less civility but wouldn't either make for a better show?

At times, I find myself oddly interested in cooking shows. What's odd about this is that I do very little cooking…and what I do do is way simpler than anything that is likely to ever be taught on a cooking show. Matter o' fact, not only could I never prepare 90% of what they make on cooking shows but with my weird array of food allergies and my increasing dislike of certain edibles, I probably couldn't or wouldn't eat 90% of what's prepared on those programs.

I don't know why I watch them; maybe to make myself feel better about not cooking. One half-hour of Alton Brown explaining how the molecular structure of acorn squash is altered when you sprinkle it with Kosher Salt and I'm convinced I know too little to even be allowed into a kitchen, let alone cook in it.

But an odd thing is happening to cooking programs. They all seem to be turning into life-and-death competitions where the idea is no longer to make a great soufflé but to make it in nine minutes in a strange kitchen with insufficient ingredients and moments of panic. And then you have to stand before a team of judges who will taste it…and some of them may say hurtful things about your skills and vote you off the show.

Every time I turn on what looks like a cooking show these days, what I find is a contest that seems to have been made up just for the purposes of televising a contest. In fact, most of them seem to have been configured to give the audience moments of despair when someone is eliminated and must fight back tears of disappointment as they make the Exit of Shame. And I usually do not understand why most of the judges are qualified to judge others.

You want to know how unqualified some of those judges are? I was recently asked to be judge on a popular cooking competition series. I turned it down for a number of reasons. In no particular order…

• I don't like being on camera. I can tolerate it if I feel I'm really, really qualified to be there…like if they want someone to talk about Jack Kirby. But I sure don't feel qualified to judge cooking even if my fellow judges will be equally unqualified.
• Whoever the contestants are, they certainly cook better than I do. I don't want to judge anyone and declare them a loser but I especially don't want to crush the spirit of someone who's better than I am at the activity under discussion.
• The show in question is non-union and doesn't pay. I would be expected to get myself there, dressed appropriately, and they expect me to do it, sans compensation, for the exposure or the importance or just thrill of being on television. (That last one is apparently enough for a lot of people.)
• What if the food we're supposed to sample and judge is something my allergies will not permit me to eat?
• And finally, they would want me to be at the studio — which is about 90 minutes from where I live — at 8 AM and it is not impossible that I would need to be there for fourteen hours.

Any one of these was reason enough to say no and I did. A few days later, I was talking to a friend of mine who had been asked a few years ago to be on one of these and he said yes. "It was awful," he said…and when I asked why, he related the following…

Well, for one thing, we were there forever. They had different teams and we had to sit there and wait while the camera crews went back and forth between the different teams that were each cooking the same thing. Each team had like thirty minutes to do the assignment but what they didn't tell you on the show was it wasn't the same thirty minutes. They couldn't film four teams at the same time so they did two and two…and then after they filmed each team making their entry, they had the chefs on that team go back and re-create some stages of the process for the cameras. They needed different angles and shots of the chefs getting panicked.

They also had to build in drama. You know…one team spills something and another team brought the wrong spices. There had to be a disaster in each case to crank up the suspense. A lot of that was planned. We were supposed to ignore the problems and just judge the finished food items…but then when it came time to explain why we eliminated the one we eliminated, then we were expected to mention the disasters as among the reasons.

We were told we had a free choice to pick whoever we wanted as the winners and losers but the producers made it pretty clear to us how they were hoping we'd rule. And then when it came time to explain why we gave someone a low grade, the producers would say, "Now, when we start filming say something like, 'I thought it was too salty and your sauce was too runny.'" So they'd start filming and we'd say, "I thought it was too salty and your sauce was too runny." I mean, if you want to do this kind of thing, what's the point in having them not want to ask you back?

We shot the ending — where we announce which of the last two teams won — three times. The first two times, the winning team didn't seem jubilant enough so the director said some lie like "We had technical problems, we have to do it again." And then the producers would say, "Uh, since we have to do it again, maybe you winners could be more excited and hug each other." Eventually, they got what they wanted. If they hadn't, we'd still be there.

Hearing all that made me really glad I'd turned down my big chance. And it confirmed my belief that there's nothing on television with less reality than a Reality Show. Unless it's a Ted Cruz commercial.