Monthly Archives: June 2016

Hello. I'm back. I was away. Yesterday, I took an Amtrak train up to Santa Barbara where my buen amigo Sergio Aragonés and I spoke to a class of undergraduates who are maybe-perhaps interested in careers in the entertainment industry. This was at the University of California, Santa Barbara where the class is taught by my longtime pal, Cheri Steinkellner. Cheri knows the field well. She and her husband Bill are Emmy-winning TV writers and producers (Cheers, The Jeffersons, many others), Tony-nominated playwrights (Sister Act) and they've done loads of other impressive things.

The class seemed to enjoy hearing about Sergio's and my careers, together and apart…and they enjoyed watching us do a mini-version of the Quick Draw! game we do at Comic-Con. Afterwards, Sergio and I went to dinner with Bill, Cheri and two of their friends. Sergio went home. I spent the night at the Steinkellners' lovely home and then today, Bill drove me back home to Los Angeles. And that's where the heck I've been.

I'm taking the weekend off from thinking/writing about the presidential election. I wish I could take June, July and August off as well but I'll probably be back following the thing by Monday. Tomorrow, I have a Muhammad Ali anecdote to share with you.

• "We need credibility in the political arena. Let's hire the guy who was so certain Romney would win in a landslide!" http://tinyurl.com/za7nwub

For those of you new to this blog: A mushroom soup day means that I may be too busy to post much today. What does that have to do with mushroom soup? I may also be too busy today to figure that out.

So what's up with the Trump News? He and his staff continue to throw reporters out of campaign rallies and Trump continues to make promises about controlling the media. All of this is loudly cheered by that certain section of the population that doesn't like it when the press — as it occasionally does — points out that people are believing things that may not be true.

As Fred Kaplan notes, Hillary Clinton is starting to show that when Trump slams her, she can slam him back pretty well. I smell a battle ahead when it comes time for these two folks to debate and Trump tries to control the format and moderators to his advantage. He'll do that, you know.

A lot of Mr. Trump's business practices remind me of a TV producer I worked for who viewed every business relationship as a negotiation…and every negotiation as a battle which he had to "win" in some way. If he was prepared to pay me $5000 to write a script and my agent called up and said, "Mark wants $5000," that wouldn't do. Any other producer would have said "Fine" but this guy wouldn't because he had to control the negotiation. He had to dominate it some way and make certain that I was giving in to his offer. So in that case, if we thought he was prepared to pay me $5000, my agent would say, "Mark demands $6000 or he won't do the show" and the producer or his rep would say "$5000 and not a penny more" and we'd give in. He'd be happy because he'd be able to pretend he beat me. He'd even be happy if we'd demanded $7000 and his guy got us to come down to $5500.

It was all about who's the boss and that's how Trump rolls. Watch. When they begin to plan the debates, he'll try to play things so that he can tell his supporters, "She was so desperate to debate me that she gave in to my demands."

Meanwhile, one of the things occupying me at the moment is planning the panels I'll be hosting at Comic-Con this year. The schedule seems to be pretty much set — a fact I mention because people always contact me in June and even early July to ask if I can help them arrange a panel or event they want to do at the con. That's wrong two ways, the first being that the convention has a whole, expert Programming Department and I'm not part of it. I'm just a guy who does a lot of panels there. Also, the schedule gets set around two months before the con and there's very little chance of events being added after that. I have to now figure out who's going to be on my panels but the times, room assignments and such are all pretty much locked.

The schedule and event descriptions will be released about two weeks before the convention. We're not supposed to announce things before that but I think it's okay if I tell you that I'm hosting all the same panels I usually host — at the same times and in the same rooms — plus some others.

Lastly before I get outta here: Some jokes just write themselves. This is a true item…

The National ENQUIRER today announced that renowned Author and Political Commentator Dick Morris would be joining the magazine in the role of Chief Political Commentator & Correspondent. The appointment of Morris to the editorial team further establishes The ENQUIRER as one of the leading voices of this political season.

It's a match made in heaven: A newspaper and a reporter, both of whom are constantly defended with the cry, "Hey, they're not always wrong." Except, of course, that Dick Morris is. See you later.

My favorite musical group, Big Daddy, is back with a music video of their interpretation of the song, "New York, New York" — a version that will probably send John Kander to his grave and cause Fred Ebb to roll over in his. But maybe not. I prefer Big Daddy's arrangement of the tune over Frank Sinatra's.

Big Daddy, in case you didn't know, is a group founded on the principle that the only acceptable sound is the fifties sound…so when they come across a song that doesn't sound like a fifties song, they fix it so that it does. If you're anywhere near Burbank, California and you'd like to hear them performing live, they're playing on Friday evening, June 24 at the Burbank Music Academy. Tickets can be purchased on this site. They'll be doing lots of great songs including perhaps even this one…

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum lists all sorts of things Trump does that a presidential candidate is not supposed to do — and with good reason. The worst is probably this one…

Trump is running not to be president of all Americans, but to be the clan leader of white Americans. Those white Americans who respond to his message hear his abusive comments, not as evidence of his unfitness for office, but as proof of his commitment to their tribe.

Nice of Frum to spell "clan" with a C instead of a K there. And while I'm at it, I'll link you to Jeffrey Toobin explaining how Trump doesn't understand how the Supreme Court works. He only understands that those who support Donald Trump must be rewarded and those who oppose him must be slapped down hard.

Bernie Sanders keeps vowing to fight all the way to the convention. Matthew Yglesias thinks he won't; that before it convenes, Sanders will face the reality of numbers, drop out of the race and endorse Hillary Clinton. That seems like the most likely scenario to me…though I do keep in mind that a lot of most likely scenarios have not happened with this election. I just can't imagine how Sanders can have any sort of effective future in politics if he doesn't do that…and he hasn't been running his campaign to become ineffective.

Then again, it might not be as neat as all that. The polls for California are still all over the place. The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll has Clinton at 49% and Sanders at 47%, which is within the survey's margin of error…in effect, a tie. Okay — but even if Sanders wins California, he won't have more delegates than Clinton, nor will more Democrats have voted for him. His path to the nomination would still involve persuading the so-called "Superdelegates" to switch their allegiance from the candidate with the most delegates and the most votes from rank-and-file Democrats to the guy who finished second in both categories. Hard to imagine that happening.

The Marx Brothers made their Broadway debut in a 1924 revue called I'll Say She Is. They did two other Broadway shows — The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers — which were made into movies and otherwise had lives after they closed in New York…but I'll Say She Is disappeared, never to be seen again. Well, not until recently when a gent named Noah Diamond led the way to bring it back, first in a 2014 workshop production and now in a fully-staged off-Broadway production which opens tonight.

Since I'm in Los Angeles and it's at the Connelly Theater on East 4th Street in New York, I won't be seeing it any time soon…but of course, we're quite intrigued by the whole project. This article by Adam Gopnik makes it sound pretty wonderful but it also makes it sound like the folks behind it only found a few pieces of the original script and score and so have had to make up a lot of it anew. That doesn't mean it isn't a good show. It just makes us wonder how much of what they present is what the Brothers Marx did back in '24.

(One error in the article: Gopnik writes of the search for pieces of the material and discusses "…a version of the Napoleon scene that had, improbably, been made into a rather mediocre episode in a long-forgotten, cheaply made cartoon special in 1970, with the very elderly Groucho supplying his lines and Hans Conried doing the other brother's voices." That was The Mad, Mad, Mad Comedians produced by Rankin-Bass back then and while Groucho did supply his own voice, the other guy wasn't Hans Conried. It was Paul Frees. Paul did a better Chico Marx than Chico Marx. I linked to a copy of the show back here.)

Anyway, I hope the show's terrific. I also hope that the publicity about it causes someone someplace to think, "Hey, I think I have an old, complete script called I'll Say She Is in my attic…"

Keith Olbermann on how the media goes too easy on Donald Trump because he's good for their ratings. I doubt there are many folks in the business who would disagree with his premise even as they commit the crime.

I have me a busy day ahead. Dunno when I'll be getting back to the blog here so I figured I'd better soup things up and give you warning. But before I go…

A couple of folks have written to quibble with my premise that saying Donald Trump is deliberately lying is nicer than saying he's a pathological liar. This isn't worth a whole lotta debate but I do think the latter is the more insulting view. A deliberate liar could theoretically stop lying. The pathological one probably cannot.

Speaking of the man everyone's speaking of: The newly-unsealed documents in the Trump University lawsuit do not speak well of Mr. Trump. It's looking like a pretty blatant swindle there with Trump only concerned with his profit and his image, not whether his business actually delivered that which was promised. I don't think this will cost him a lot of votes but it may make him seem even more hypocritical when he refers to "Crooked Hillary."

I can't believe I'm planning panels for this year's Comic-Con already. Wasn't last year's Comic-Con about a month ago?

Lots of folks online are bashing Mrs. Bill Cosby for standing by Mr. Bill Cosby. I guess it's easy to say "Well, if I was in her position…" but you're not. We don't know what that marriage is really like and how much they mean to one another or what it would mean to either of them to separate. I don't think abandoning a loved one in trouble is usually a great thing and I don't think staying with them is always "enabling" and like I said, we don't know much about their relationship. We just don't.

Want to know who's going to win the California Primary, Bernie or Hillary? If you search a bit online, you can find a poll that will show he will or one that will indicate she will or one which says it's too close to call. I sure have no idea. I'm not even that sure what kind of outcome — him winning, her winning, the winner winning by a lot or a little — I'd prefer. At this point, I just want one of them to win and for the loser to rally his/her supporters behind the victor.

I just hope all the Bernie-backers who've been saying they'd never vote for Hillary, and all the Hillary-supporters who say they'll never cast votes for Bernie will take their lead from Marco Rubio and promptly reverse themselves. Rubio's been apologizing for saying Trump had small hands and a smaller penis and I expect any day now, he'll be apologizing to Donald for even running against him. Hope we're not going to see Jeb Bush saying, "Donald was right…I am low-energy" and Carly Fiorina announce, "I'm sorry, Trump was completely right about my face."

See you folks later…maybe.