Monthly Archives: May 2016

Michael Feinstein is (of course) a fine musical performer and historian. Earlier in his life, he was the archivist for Ira Gershwin. Here's an hour of him discussing and performing the works of George and Ira…

Jonathan Chait summarizes something I have long believed about House Speaker Paul Ryan. Ryan talks a lot about how his main goal in government is to reduce the size of the deficit but his actions make it clear that's not so. His Number One Goal is for the rich to pay little or nothing in taxes and for the poor to get little or nothing in the way of government support. And there is no Number Two Goal.

Paul Worthington, who describes himself as a "long time reader/first time correspondent" writes to ask…

As you have often noted in your writing posts, a key requirement for career success is simply doing the hard work. As many other writers I follow say, it's putting your butt in the chair, and writing every day.

My question: How do you build up this self-discipline? It seems you've always had it. Is that the case?

I have been lucky to have a successful journalism career, but it was based on innate talent (which I was gifted with, not that I earned or deserve) much more than regular hard work. Now I am attempting to write novels, and that simply requires much more regular effort than I've ever maintained for a long time.

It's something of a chicken/egg quandary: These days it's become business/career conventional wisdom to point out that the key to success is grit. Determination. Follow-through. Self-discipline. But it seems to me, an admittedly lazy coaster, that if you don't innately have grit, you can't simply develop it — because the discipline to develop it requires grit in the first place!

I'm not the guy to answer this, Paul, because I came to my career from the opposite direction. I became a writer because I loved writing. Even when I had no audience and no glimmerings of a paycheck, I had zero problem putting my smaller-than-it-is-now butt in the chair and writing every day. I have always looked askance at the Dorothy Parker quote, "I hate writing but I love having written." I always think, "If you hate writing, you'd be nuts to choose that for your life's work."

So no, I didn't have to build up much self-discipline. There are occasionally times when I don't like what I have to write — or don't like having to write it in the limited time I have before the absolute deadline — but those are small problems. And to me, the key to dealing with a small problem is to treat it as small problem and not over-dramatize it into a big one. (When friends come to me for help with what they think are Big Problems, my first advice is usually to tell them that what they have is a Small Problem and shouldn't treat it as anything more than that.)

Basically, writing comes down to this: Do the job or don't do the job. Just don't decide to do the job and then complain about having to do the job. No, it's not always easy. It's not supposed to always be easy. Neither are most things in life that you may decide are worth doing.

We're going Mushroom Soup today — and for those of you who don't know what that means, it means this: The proprietor of this blog is very busy and unlikely to be posting at his usual pace. It means that barring some unexpected, can't-wait obit, this may be the extent of the new content here today. Why is this denoted by Mushroom Soup? No one knows and no one cares.

No, I'm not worried that Donald Trump is going to beat Hillary Clinton, nor do I think recent polls really point in that direction. It's 179 days until Election Day. Much will happen that will render as irrelevant everything that seemed relevant in May. Donald said the other day he's going to carry the state of New York. You know New York: The state that has gone two-for-one for the Democrat in the last half-dozen presidential elections? Yeah, that New York.

And hey, how long is it going to be before everyone catches on that Trump statements have a shelf life of three days max? He says it on Monday and by Thursday, even he doesn't think it exists anymore. Heck, lately he's been saying things like that the U.S. can default on its debts and his own staff is walking it back within the hour. It's all just noise to get coverage today and his supporters — so far — don't seem to care that he reverses positions like a porn star.

What else can I write about here before I get back to paying work? I'm liking Stephen Colbert's show a tad less since their new showrunner did some revamping. I don't see that it's made any difference in the ratings yet.

This evening, Turner Classic Movies is running X – The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, the cheapo 1963 Roger Corman horror movie with Ray Milland, Don Rickles and Harold J. Stone. One day many years ago, I found myself watching it on TV with Mr. Stone in the room. His character dies about ten minutes into it and he said as we watched that scene, "I guess I was lucky. I didn't have to be in the rest of the movie." At the time, this film made a lot of money because moviegoers thought (wrongly) they were going to see a lot of nudity. I'm surprised no one has remade it today when they could.

That's all for now. Back soon.

David Axelrod, who was Chief Strategist for Barack Obama's presidential campaign, has a podcast. Here's a video of the show he just did with Jon Stewart. This is for those of us who really, really miss Jon Stewart…

The folks over at fivethirtyeight.com think it's pretty unlikely that there's going to be a third-party presidential candidate this year. That's not counting the ones from the organizations already set up like the Green Party and Libertarian Party. But those parties might get a little bump this time from folks who just plain don't want to vote for Trump or Hillary.

Andy Hoffman has a question…

Did you ever meet or work with the surrealist cartoonist and drawer of cats, B. "Hap" Kliban?

In one of Sergio's Groo introductions, he drew a signed Kliban illustration hanging on the wall of his studio.

There's also the 1977 fanzine that includes a letter you wrote and a cover by Kliban called Where the Beer and the Cantaloupe Play.

I've been reading your blog for years and have found no mention of him. There is very little information available on Kliban, so it would be great if you had any to share for all the fans of his work.

Meet? Yeah, a few times at Comic-Con Internationals back when they were called by other names. We had lunch one time and he was on a couple of panels I moderated. Here…I have this photo of the two of us from one of those panels…

I'm afraid though I didn't get a lot of info about the man from the limited time we spent together. He seemed like a private kind o' guy who was pretty much willing to talk about any topic but himself or cartooning. He had some pretty firm views on morality and censorship and especially about women. A few of them made me uncomfy but not to the point where I couldn't get along with him.

The disinterest in cartooning seemed oddly appropriate to me, coming as it did from a person whose approach and style seemed largely divorced from anything that had come before. I think that was one of the things that was so impressive about his work. He didn't seem to be doing a variation on something you'd seen before. His drawings were highly organic and natural and usually very funny. He had suddenly gotten very popular and seemed a tad embarrassed that he was making more money off merchandising than he was from the cartooning itself. When I mentioned that I had a Kliban Cat shower curtain in my home, he winced and muttered something like "I wish you hadn't told me that."

He was besieged a lot at those cons for sketches. This was back when a lot of artists did free ones at conventions and the main reason to not do them was that if you got started, you might spend your entire convention doing nothing else. I asked him, after he'd done about a dozen in quick succession for attendees, if he was sick of people asking him for sketches. He said, "Not half as sick as I am of people asking me what the 'B' stands for. I heard, though not from him, that it stood for Bernard.

Here's a photo I took of him doing a sketch for somebody. And I didn't ask him for one but when he saw I had a sketchbook that I was passing around for others to draw in, he grabbed it up and inserted an unsolicited pussycat…

I didn't really work with him on anything but…well, here's the story. Around '83, I was writing for an animation producer who called me in one day and told me he'd acquired the rights to do a prime-time cartoon special based on the Kliban Cats. ABC, he said, had already said they wanted it, subject to the studio coming up with an acceptable script. "They're so hot on it," he told me, "this could easily become a weekly series."

I was a bit puzzled as Mr. Kliban's cats had never appeared in any sort of story continuity, nor did they seem to have names or established personalities or much consistency from drawing to drawing. The producer told me, "You'll have to invent all of that." I was not the first writer he'd had take a stab at this. Another one — someone I didn't know at all — had written an outline which everyone thought went way, way off in the wrong direction. "I'm not even going to show it to you," he said. "I want you to start clean."

I told him I knew Kliban and asked if I should contact him or if we were going to have meetings or anything. The producer said no, that wouldn't be necessary. "We're licensing the rights to do whatever we want with the material. He doesn't want to be involved." I was handed a Xeroxed packet of Kliban cat drawings. There were about seven cats who were to form the core cast of this special. For each of the seven, there were a few Kliban sketches of the cat from various angles, plus the writer before me had named each cat. The names were about the only thing he'd done that everyone liked so we were going to keep those. Everything else was up to me.

My agent firmed up a deal with this producer's lawyer for me to write a special/pilot for The Kliban Cats and I began work on an overview. I gave each cat a personality and a modus operandi and a way of relating to the other cats and I figured out where they lived, what they did, etc. ABC okayed it all with minor notes and I had just been sent off to write the actual pilot script when a San Diego Comic Convention occurred. When I told the producer I'd probably be seeing Kliban there, he said, "Great! Fill him in a little on what we're doing."

I ran into B. the first day of the con and he greeted me warmly. I told him I was working on the TV show based on his characters. He said, "What TV show based on my characters?" I told him all about the project. He knew nothing about any such deal and ran off to his hotel room to call…well, someone — his agent or his lawyer or his publisher or…I don't know who he called.

An hour or two later though, he said to me, "I'm glad you told me about this." As near as we could figure out, here's what happened: He was against doing this kind of thing, at least for now. His reps thought he should so when they got the inquiry from the producer's lawyer, they said in effect, "Yes, the rights are available. Give us your best offer and we'll present it to our client." They were thinking that a huge offer might change his mind. If it didn't, no harm done. And then, since no firm offer was made, they never told him at all.

B. said he didn't really want his characters animated, at least for television at that time and certainly not for the kind of money that a studio like that was talking about. He definitely wasn't about to make the kind of deal the producer had told me they'd made, where he just sells the rights and lets the buyer do whatever they want with it. He thanked me repeatedly for letting him know about it and apologized that the steps he and his reps were about to take — calling the studio, reminding them there was no deal and there would not be one — would cost me some money. That did sorta happen but that didn't bother me. I mean, it was his work. He had not only the legal but also the moral right to control what was done with it.

Sure enough, the Monday after the con, the producer called me and said to stop work on the script. His lawyer, he said, had screwed things up somehow, telling him the deal had been made when it hadn't been. Apparently, the attorney was wrongly certain a deal would be made with Kliban's reps and that it was safe to start on the development. This kind of thing happens more often than one might think.

I am not sure why but often in Hollywood, the parties come to a verbal understanding on some transaction, work starts based on the belief that "we have a deal" and then the paperwork that enshrines that deal follows, sometimes weeks or even months later. Occasionally, getting that paperwork drafted and signed requires additional negotiation. I was once halfway through writing a screenplay for a movie when the two sides began arguing over the terms they'd settled on months earlier and the whole thing was called off. And a year or two after the whole Kliban project I'm telling you about, the exact same thing happened to me at another studio regarding another famous property that the studio was sure they'd acquired. But they hadn't.

Think that's impossible? Wait. A few years earlier — in 1978 — Filmation Studios produced a Saturday morning series for NBC called The Fabulous Funnies. It featured animated versions of popular newspaper strips of the day such as Broom-Hilda, Alley Oop, Nancy and Tumbleweeds. The Monday after the first episode aired, Filmation's lawyers heard from Tom Ryan, creator and owner of Tumbleweeds. It seems each of the lawyers thought someone else in their office had made a deal with Ryan for the rights…but no one had.

Once Kliban's attorneys shut things down, the producer I was working for decided to try and salvage the project. ABC liked what I was writing and as brilliant as B. Kliban was, he didn't own the concept of a band of cats. The decision was made to remove everything Kliban did own by designing different cats that looked nothing like his. A new cartoonist redesigned the cast in a completely different style and his work was so good that ABC said they'd still buy the special, not for prime-time but for Saturday morning. That meant a new production schedule, one that was so tight that I had to call in another writer to help me finish the script on time.

Voice actors were auditioned, selected and recorded, then animation commenced. I think they were about halfway through animating the show when a new problem popped out of nowhere, as new problems tend to do. An Associate Producer at the studio was cleaning out his office when he came upon a set of the Kliban cat drawings that had started the whole endeavor. The drawings were the same ones that had been given to me but on mine, the names of the characters — the names that had been supposedly bestowed upon them by the writer who had preceded me — were typed. On this set, they were handwritten in — in the handwriting of B. Kliban. How, the A.P. wondered, did that happen?

A hurried internal investigation yielded the answer: Kliban, not the writer I replaced, had named the cats. And those names were heard in the dialogue that had been recorded for the show that was now well into production.

New names were chosen for them — names with the same number of syllables. Then about half the voice actors had to be called back in so the lines in which the characters' names were mentioned could be replaced. That meant those actors had to be paid for another day's work even though most of them just did one or two lines — or in one case, just yelled one name. The studio was so happy to have to spend that money, he said sarcastically.

Finally, the special was finished and it aired and no one said anything about turning it into a series. It didn't turn out badly but I suspect its roots as a kind of bastard concoction made it feel like a less-than-inspired notion.

The following year down in San Diego, I told Kliban the entire story. He laughed and said, "You know, I realized later on that maybe what I should have done was to let them animate it and then sue them for a whole ton of money." Then he added, "If you'd agreed to testify that you never told me about it, I would have cut you in on the deal."

The other day, President Obama delivered a commencement speech at Howard University. It ran 45 minutes but you might want to watch it because it's a pretty good speech…

It was not, as some might have expected or even hoped, 45 minutes of Trump-bashing or even Republican-bashing. Much of it was critical of those on the left who demand immediate revolution. A lot of it will strike his critics as self-serving but as one who agrees with his main thesis — that America is a much better place than it was when he graduated high school — I don't see any way he could say that without implying a few victory laps.

How did this happen? Well, here's a lift from Obama's speech that strikes me as true…

If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you're not going to get what you want. And if you don't get what you want long enough, you will eventually think the whole system is rigged. And that will lead to more cynicism, and less participation, and a downward spiral of more injustice and more anger and more despair. And that's never been the source of our progress. That's how we cheat ourselves of progress.

I suppose some will take that as a swing at Bernie Sanders supporters. Some of the ones who've written me could stand to learn a message that Obama repeats several times in this speech: "Passion is vital but you've got to have a strategy." I would be quite happy to see Bernie Sanders as our Chief Exec but I'm kinda repulsed by the belief, expressed by those who think Trump will destroy America, that Trump would be preferable to not getting Bernie. It reminds me a lot of the folks to whom Jon Stewart has occasionally said, "You're confusing not getting everything you want with an attack on your religion."

After I started writing the above, I noticed that Jonathan Chait, a political writer I like, had noted Obama's speech and he wrote this about it. I'm not necessarily in agreement with the parts about "political correctness." That term is being used so widely with so many disparate definitions, that I think it's become largely useless. Clearly, what a lot of people think it means when they use it is not what a lot of others mean when they use it. But I do agree with Mr. Chait (and I guess, the President) that establishment politics is working in this country. It's not working as fully and quickly as some would like but the other kind ain't working at all.

That's right, kids! It's your ol' pal Mark with another episode in his series about the life of a writer…especially the times when no one seems to want what he or she is writing. Part 1 can be read here, Part 2 can be read here, Part 3 can be read here, Part 4 can be read here, Part 5 can be read here, Part 6 can be read here, Part 7 can be read here, Part 8 can be read here and Part 9 can be read here. Part 10 goes something like this…

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One of those folks who wanted their question answered but not their name mentioned wrote…

Thank you for the series on Rejection, especially when you veer into talking about acting, which is what I do. A lot of what you write about writing is applicable to me and my world. In my case, my problem is a growing, sometimes irrational anger at the people who do the hiring and casting. They expect great competence from those of us who audition but I see little competence on their end, especially when it comes to informing us what the hell it is that they want. As you say, I often walk out of auditions and interviews with no friggin' clue what just happened. I don't know if I did well or I did bad because I don't know what I was supposed to show them.

I know you're not an expert at anger management but can you give me any pointers on what to do about the rage I sometimes feel at these situations and at the people who decide who gets to work on the stage and who has to go back to their day job at Olive Garden?

Well, the first thing of course — and I'll bet you know this — is to not direct that rage at the people you hope are going to hire you. Some of what happens in an audition is about whether you can act. Some of it is about whether you fit the part…and it's very important to remember that they may decide you're a terrific actor but not the one for this particular role. And some of it is to determine whether you're someone they can work with. It is totally possible to qualify on the first two counts but because you come across like a jerk or a troubled or angry person in the interview, you get disqualified or downgraded.

It is also important to remember that in any hiring situation, the folks with the power set the rules.  If you were Tom Hanks and they really needed you to get their movie made or make it successful, you could expect them to prove their competence to you.  Since you need them more than they need you, they don't have to be competent.  They just have to hire you.

All that said, I think it's important in this world to not conflate all your problems into one big, steaming resentment. Try not to think of any given acting job as more than one acting job. And you writers, don't think of any particular writing job as more than one writing job. It might be more than just that but the more you inflate it, the more you're setting yourself up for disappointment if you don't get it. Heck, you may even be disappointed if you do get it and all it turns out to be is the one job with none of the subsequent, presumed benefits.

We all have a tendency to fantasize. You're up for a situation that could, just maybe, change your life. Maybe it's a sitcom pilot and you get it and if it turns out to be the next Seinfeld or Big Bang Theory, it's going to lead to a lot of money and other offers. So you commence imagining all the many ways in which it might do that. When I started out, I sometimes thought that way and it was the wrong way to approach it. I learned to think of it in what was for me the right way: I'm up for one job…and all it might be is one job.

And if you think of it as one job, then the worst that can happen is that you didn't get one job.

The dangerous thing to do, I think, is to think like this: Oh, if I get this then they'll hire me again and again and others will want to hire me and I'll make a ton of money and my parents will finally get off my case to find another profession and my mate will stop nagging me about my income and I'll be able to afford to get my teeth fixed and I'll have health insurance and maybe I can get a new car before the clunker I'm driving falls apart and I'll have better self-esteem so I won't feel so bad about myself at times and maybe I'll get some awards and that will be even better for my self-esteem and maybe I'll even attract some real attractive members of the opposite sex (or the same one if that's applicable) and I'll have a great life…

And yes, there are writers and actors and others who think like that. Then when they don't get it or they do and the project fails, something within them feels they've lost millions of dollars that were never really there, that new car they never really had, the awards they were never really up for, etc. It increases the sense of loss exponentially.

Why do that to yourself? More importantly, why do that to yourself when the hiring/selection process is so capricious and controlled by so many factors that have nothing to do with you?

I know this is easy to say, not so easy to do but you oughta consider trying it anyway. Just think of any one opportunity as one opportunity and nothing more…because that's all it may be. Even if you get it, it might not lead to anything else.  And if you get it and it does segue into a regular gig or kickstart some real career momentum, great.  You can be happily surprised.  Isn't that better than being (unnecessarily) way more disappointed than you need to be?

I wish I had a great anecdote to post here about William Schallert, who passed away Sunday at the age of 93. He was a kind of performer I greatly admire — the guy who worked all the time without ever quite becoming a star, the kind of actor who'd enter a scene in some TV show or movie and everyone would go, "Oh, that guy!"

He occasionally had a named recurring role like Patty Duke's father on The Patty Duke Show or Admiral Harold Harmon Hargrade on Get Smart…but it was not easy to just tell people who he was. Even though he notched hundreds and hundreds of screen appearances, most folks didn't have a name to connect with the face.

Directors and producers love a guy like Bill Schallert. He wouldn't have worked that much if he hadn't been solid and dependable. He was also a voiceover specialist, a union activist and, based on the few times I got to meet him, a very nice guy. You'd think with all he did, I'd have a story about him but I don't. All I have is respect.

Dave Sikula writes to ask of me…

This time I have an actual question rather than a comment. Do you have any idea what it is about Los Angeles media and car chases? Seems like at least once a week (if not much more) I see something on social media from my SoCal friends about yet another car chase.

I left L.A. in 1991, before this phenomenon started, and in all the places I've lived since, have never seen anything like it. There are car chases here in the Bay Area, but stations cover them in retrospect (if at all). Why do all L.A. media stop dead when it comes to these things? Are they ratings-grabbers? Is there ever anything new to them? Are they actually exciting? Inquiring minds want to know.

Well, if you're asking why Los Angeles has so many car chases, it probably has something to do with having so many cars. More cars = more car chases.

Why do the stations drop everything and cover them? You said it: They're ratings-grabbers. There must be some evidence that if you're Channel 4 and there's a live high-speed chase over on Channel 2 that you're not covering, a lot of your viewers are going to switch over there to watch it.

Is there ever anything new to them? Sometimes. I think the appeal has a lot to do with the fact that they're live and unpredictable. Very little on television is except for sports — and most sporting events do not feature the possibility that you'll see someone, maybe even an innocent bystander, killed or injured. Also, a lot of police pursuits are on familiar turf. You often see it happening on streets you've driven on. I'm not proud that I find them (usually) fascinating but I'm afraid I do.

I am a big fan of Lewis Black, who just may be my favorite comedian working these days. I especially enjoy watching his show.

What show? Lewis Black has a show? Yes, he does and I've mentioned this here before. Most weeks, he is in some city on this continent doing his stand-up along with his opening act, John Bowman. At the close of each show, he does an additional 15-25 minutes that is streamed live to the Internet. I told you all about it here and yes, he's still doing it. However, I should also have mentioned that he has a fan club that you can join on his website for twenty bucks a year.

Now, you may be asking yourself, "Why the hell would I want to do this?" Well, two reasons…

• It gives you access to sections of his website that may interest you including interviews and articles and the complete archive of his little Internet shows. At any given time, you can view the most recent five or six of them for free but membership will allow you to watch 75 or so of them at your leisure. They're pure, mostly-spontaneous Lewis Black and they're usually quite good.
• It gives you the chance to purchase, without paying absurd fees to scalpers or ticket agents, good seats to upcoming live Lewis Black concerts. He has tour dates up for the rest of the year in, among other cities: Des Moines, Rochester, Skokie, San Francisco, Reno, Wichita, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Monterey and quite a few more. I got seats for his December 10 gig in Los Angeles.  They're supposed to be in the first four rows and I paid $90 each. Online agents are already asking $400 each for seats in the twentieth row…so that $20 fee to join his fan club is looking like a great investment.

And there are other reasons to join but if you like the guy, those two oughta be enough.  That's all I have to say about this.

Marx Brothers fans have been known to mud-wrestle over which of the brothers' films was the best but if you say their worst was the 1949 Love Happy, I doubt anyone will challenge you to a duel.  Its 85 minutes don't get much better than this one minute featuring but one Marx Brother and a then-unknown Marilyn Monroe. Note that by this stage in his career, Groucho had abandoned his famous greasepaint mustache and grown a real one…

Now that Donald J. Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, a lot of folks who said they would never support him are supporting him. Just as a lot of people who are saying they'll never support Hillary Clinton will wind up supporting her.

By the way: I keep seeing articles on the web which write out Trump's name like that: Donald J. Trump. Why the middle initial? Is it unclear which Donald Trump anyone is writing about?

And in other news, I've decided that if I'm ever elected President of the United States, I will build a thirty-foot wall around cole slaw. And I'm going to make Canter's Delicatessen pay for it.

Yesterday here, I was talking about a silly plan some Republicans are toying with of running a third-party candidate — someone they consider, unlike Mr. Trump, a true conservative. The idea there is not to win the election the normal way but to split the vote such that no one reaches 270 and the decision gets thrown into the Republican-controlled House. I said — and I was wrong to say this — "It could be the third-party conservative or even someone whose name didn't appear on any ballot."

Why that was wrong: Because the Constitution, that document people swear by when it permits them to do what they wanna, says that the House would pick from "the persons having the highest numbers [of electoral votes] not exceeding three on the list of those voted for as President." That would mean they'd pick that third-party guy since they sure wouldn't pick Hillary and the whole idea of doing this is not to pick Donald. It's still a terrible idea that wouldn't work and that would damage our democracy if it did.

Thanks to the many folks who wrote in to remind me of this.