Monthly Archives: August 2016

I got this the other day from John Heaton…

In one of your recent blog posts, you wrote, "Don't play the slot machines at the airport." My sole Las Vegas gambling experience was at the airport, and I won seven bucks on one $0.75 spin. I take it this modest success was atypical?

No, it was probably typical in that seven bucks is about all the slots at the airport ever pay off. Elsewhere, they have been known to spit out payoffs in two, three, four, five, six and even seven figures.

It's pretty well-known in Vegas and Reno and places like that that slot machines are not set for loose playoffs in places where you play them because you're stuck there. If you're at the Tropicana and the machines just aren't paying off for you, you can walk across the street to the Excalibur or the MGM Grand and play there. If you're sitting near Gate 17 waiting for your flight to board in an hour and a lot's going in but nothing's coming out, where are you going to go?

The slots at the airport have no reason to be competitive. When someone scores a big win at a casino, the casino takes out ads and billboard proclaiming that Becky Lou Freebish from Walla Walla won three million bucks at their establishment. That's to entice gamblers who'll think that casino's slots must be easy to win on. When there's a huge payout at the airport, no one says, "Hey, let's go out and play the slots at the airport!" (For one thing, you can't if you aren't flying somewhere.)

There have been big jackpots at the airport slots but since those don't noticeably increase business there, how do you think the slots are set? Conventional wisdom among some slot players is that the machines at the airport are, these days, no worse than a lot of the slots in casinos. That may be so but the point is that there are better machines than others to play and you at least have a chance of finding one in other venues.

This is eight women on a street somewhere performing "Up the Ladder to the Roof"…

Matt Taibbi on how awful much of the press has been during this election. I suspect it will get worse as the media needs a "Trump Comeback" narrative whether it's justified or not.

Here's a guide to what's opening on Broadway this Fall. There's not a lot there that excites me…and of course, no mention of the musical version of The Nutty Professor.

Yes, it's Part 15 and by now, you should know what this series is all about. 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, Part 9 can be read here, Part 10 can be read here, Part 11 can be read here, Part 12 can be read here, Part 13 can be read here and Part 14 can be read here. Part 15 awaits…

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We're talking about writers writing "on the come," meaning they don't get paid unless the project succeeds in some way. I believe that one of the main mistakes writers make — and yes, I have made many of them myself — is to invest their work in ventures which have little chance of ever happening. And often if they do happen, they somehow do not pay much (if anything) to the writer who invested in them.

Remember that word — "invest." There's a fiction in the publishing and entertainment industries that "invest" only refers to putting up actual cash money. This is not so. Time is money and your reputation and ideas are worth something, often a lot more than any token up-front money you may have received.

We'll discuss this more in future installments. Right now, we're going down a list of conditions which should make you wary of getting involved in a publishing or producing venture without a decent amount of money paid in advance or guaranteed. Here's my list and I may be adding other items to it before we're through…

• You're writing something which if one particular buyer doesn't buy it, you can't really sell it anywhere else.
• You're writing something for a project that you're not 100% certain will ever happen at all.
• You're writing something and your fee, if they like the work, has yet to be determined.
• You're writing something for people who, if they do like your work, might not have the money to pay you.
• You're writing something where the terms of employment — who'll own it, credits, whether you receive royalties (and if so, how much), how many rewrites they can demand of you, etc. — have yet to be determined.
• You're writing something for people who really aren't sure what they want.
• You're writing something for people who just might not even read what you hand in…or have it read by someone with actual hiring/power in their company.
• You're writing something for people who are soliciting so many auditions and so much spec work that the odds are pretty damned daunting.

We covered the first one last time. This time, let's focus on the second…

• You're writing something for a project that you're not 100% certain will ever happen at all.

I believe that one of the greatest skills a professional writer can master is the ability to smell out the projects that want you to speculate — to "invest" — but which simply are not going to happen, which means they are simply not going to pay. Being properly compensated may not matter to you as much as seeing your book get printed or your script get produced. That's a choice on your part. But if neither happens, there's really nothing in it for you, right?

In some cases, the person doing the offering is of questionable ethics and intent. In other cases, they mean well but simply don't have the ability or resources to make the project happen. You need to learn to smell out the ones that are longshots and unlikely. Here are two stories about times I was offered animation projects and I decided not to gamble. These both happened more than ten years ago and in both cases, the people approaching me worked for real animation studios. We did not have our meetings at a Denny's. I went to their offices which both were adorned with posters and artwork from cartoons they'd actually produced.

Story #1: I got a call from an exec with a firm we'll call Sacco Productions, a fairly large, well established producer of animation. I was asked in to discuss a project for which they were seeking a writer. They showed me characters, sketches, outlines and such for what seemed to me like a pretty good idea. What it needed was a writer to flesh things out, develop the characters more fully, figure out how everyone interacted and, finally, write a bible and a pilot for a weekly cartoon series. (A "bible" in this small-b context is an overview of the series that explains who everyone is, how they function, etc.)

They thought I could be the one to do all that and I thought so, too…and I liked the people I'd be working with but I sure got the sense in the meeting that the money they'd be offering me would be real, real low. Obviously, I would like to be paid well but that alone is not a deal-breaker. I've turned down jobs that paid well in favor of some that paid less because the "less" ones looked like they'd be fun and would turn out well.

Anyway, on my way out of the meeting at their very nice studio, I asked the receptionist to validate my parking ticket and she said they didn't do that. The folks who'd asked me in for the meeting professed great embarrassment as they explained that they couldn't help me either. I had to pay $7.00 to exit the parking garage.

The parking fee and the sense that the money would be low were not the reason I wound up passing on that project. Then a few weeks later, the same people asked me in again to discuss a different project. I went…and it was pretty much the same meeting only about a different property. Again, I had to pay $7.00 when I left and again, I passed on doing the script they wanted me to write.

This time though on my way out I noticed something that hadn't dawned on me the first time. The guy who owned the animation studio also owned the building in which it was housed. His name was on both.

There is no reason why any office you ever go to can't validate your ticket to park in their building other than that the boss just doesn't want to pay to do that. It seemed extra-cheap in an insulting way that the owner of the building was trying to make money off people who came in for meetings.

A few weeks after I passed on that project, the same people called me for a third time. They had acquired the animation rights to a book and they knew that I was the perfect writer to handle its adaptation into a feature film. I was the only guy they were considering, I was told. It was so, so right for me and vice-versa, they said. They were ready to make me an offer on the spot except, of course, that I had to come in for a meeting and chat it up a bit so we'd be sure we were all on the same page. I told them I'd be glad to come in for that meeting…if they gave me $21.00 to do so.

The man who called me was startled. Why $21.00?

"Because," I explained, "I've paid fourteen bucks to park there already and they'll charge me another seven to park this time…"

He interrupted to say the price of parking had been raised in their building. It was now eight dollars.

"Okay," I said. "Fine. So it's twenty-two bucks now. I'll be glad to come in for the meeting if when I do, someone hands me $22.00 — in cash. I do not accept credit cards but I will take a check with two forms of I.D."

"I'll call you back," he said. When he did a few hours later, he told me he was sorry but there was no way they could give me $22.00 to come in for the meeting. "But please don't let that be an obstacle. This is a great book and you're the best possible writer for the feature we want to make out of it…"

I said, "And you're going to let $22.00 prevent you from getting the best possible writer for it? Either you don't really want me that badly or you're having this movie animated by orphans in Bangladesh getting paid fifty cents a day plus all the coal they can eat."

The fellow sighed, told me he understood but said, "I can't pay you the $22.00. I was willing to pay you out of my own pocket but they told me here they don't want to create that precedent. But I'm really sure you'll love this book and that we can make a great movie out of it. Are you sure you want to blow that off over the price of parking?"

I said, "I was going to ask you the same question." And that was darn near the end of that conversation.

I suppose someone could make a case for penny-wise/pound-foolish on my part. Maybe it would have resulted in a great movie. That's possible. Maybe they would have actually paid me well to write it. That's possible but probably less so. Maybe it was a bad idea to (most likely) burn the bridge to that company. I'm sure the next time a writer was needed for something and my name was raised, someone said, "No, he demands to be paid just to come in and take a meeting."

But maybe if I'd gone in for that meeting, it would have led to another meeting and another meeting and another meeting and so on, each costing me several hours of my life and eight bucks. And then if they had ever offered me actual money to write this script, the amount would have been so low I would have turned it down. I do know that they never made that movie.

Here's the other story. A year or three after the events in Story #1, I got a call from a lady at an animation studio we'll call Vanzetti Productions. This also was a real studio that had produced a small number of things, in this case mostly direct-to-video. She was familiar with my reputation and very flattering. She told me her studio had acquired the rights to do one or more direct-to-video animated features of Popeye the Sailor. "Would you be interested?" she asked.

Yes, I was interested. Very interested. I like Popeye. I like Popeye a lot.

Not all Popeye, of course. No one likes all Popeye. There have been many versions of Popeye over the years and some of them were not, to me, Popeye. She asked if I would come in for a meeting with her and her people. I asked her two questions…

1. Do you want to do classic Popeye or do you want to reinvent the character?
2. If I come to your office, do I get free parking?

She said yes to the free parking. I thought that was a good sign. She also said they wanted to do classic Popeye — the same spinach-guzzling gob from the Elzie Segar comic strip and the Max Fleischer cartoons. Having no desire to participate in the despoiling of a childhood favorite, I thought that was a better sign. (Actually, the Segar Popeye and the Fleischer Popeye were not the same Popeye but either one — or anywhere on the sliding scale between them — was fine by me.)

I went in. The people I met with were very nice and they seemed to me like folks who could do their part of the process very well. It was easy to imagine a great Popeye direct-to-video animated feature resulting from this association…

…until a gentleman who joined us in the meeting said, "Great, great, great. Well, all we need from you, Mark, is a few pages outlining the story you'd like to do…"

A little warning alarm went off in my head. What he should have been saying was, "Well, I guess we need to have a conversation with your agent and then we can get to work on something…"

"A few pages" is what people say when they expect you to work on spec. It roughly translates to: "You do the work and then if we need it, we'll make you an offer for it." This is arguably okay for a beginner who needs to prove his basic competence…but even there, I'd argue it's a bad way for the beginner to work. It is not acceptable when they asked you to come in because they already like your work. If you don't understand why, read previous installments in this series.

I told them, sounding as unmercenary as I could, that all those other shows I'd done — the ones that had caused them to like my work and ask me in — had involved deals made up front for payment. And when I said that, I saw the gent and the lady exchange looks and I knew right then I would not be writing Popeye for Vanzetti Productions.

A bit flustered, the gent told me that if it was up to him, they'd shower me with cash right away but King Features — those are the folks that own Popeye — were insisting on doing it this way. "They have to approve the storyline before they'll allow us to make a deal with a writer."

I thought but did not say, "If your company has the resources to make a direct-to-video Popeye movie, you must have some money. Someone's paying salaries to you two and renting this lovely office to get projects sold. How about paying a writer you claim to like for his time to write up the storyline that's going to advance your project to the next step? And how about making a deal for what you'll pay me if my storyline is approved? It's not fair to me to expect me to gamble my time without knowing that. What if King Features loves it and then I don't want to work for the money you want to pay?"

I didn't say that because there would have been no point in it. Instead, what I said was: "Well, let me think about it." That way, the meeting ended with us still being sociable and sorta friendly. But when I walked out, I knew I wasn't going to go home and write up the "few pages" and I think they also knew I wouldn't be doing that.

At least, they validated my parking. And as I was driving out of the garage there, I noticed another cartoon writer I knew driving in…which probably meant I wasn't the only person they were asking to write "a few pages." As it turned out, there were a lot of us.

That evening, my friend Earl Kress called me. He said, "I've got a career question I need to discuss with someone" and he told me about how that afternoon, he'd had a meeting with some people who wanted him to submit outlines on spec for a direct-to-video Popeye movie…

I told him about my meeting and how we weren't the only ones they were asking. I mentioned the writer I'd seen driving in as I was driving out, and Earl mentioned two more — one he'd seen going out as he went in, plus one more who was in the waiting room when he left his meeting. We later found out about at least five more.

Let's go back to our list above of cautionary signs that you may be getting involved in a bad deal. Here's the list again. How many of these apply to the Popeye project? I'd say most of them…

• You're writing something which if one particular buyer doesn't buy it, you can't really sell it anywhere else. Yep.
• You're writing something for a project that you're not 100% certain will ever happen at all. Definitely.
• You're writing something and your fee, if they like the work, has yet to be determined. Also definitely.
• You're writing something for people who, if they do like your work, might not have the money to pay you. Possibly.
• You're writing something where the terms of employment — who'll own it, credits, whether you receive royalties (and if so, how much), how many rewrites they can demand of you, etc. — have yet to be determined. That applies.
• You're writing something for people who really aren't sure what they want. Maybe.
• You're writing something for people who just might not even read what you hand in…or have it read by someone with actual hiring/power in their company. Another maybe.
• You're writing something for people who are soliciting so many auditions and so much spec work that the odds are pretty damned daunting. Another definitely.

I didn't write a few pages for them and neither did Earl. I don't know about all those other writers.

Six months later, I was at the Licensing Show and I ran into someone I knew from King Features. I asked her how the Popeye project was going with Vanzetti Studios. She told me there was no Popeye project with Vanzetti Studios and there never was one. "They inquired about the rights," she said. "And I think they made some sort of presentation to us to try to get the rights but we weren't interested in them."

Six months earlier when the lady from Vanzetti had phoned me, almost the first thing she said to me was, "We've acquired the rights to do some direct-to-video Popeye animated films." So that was a lie right off. Everything they said to me after that was built on the premise of that lie.

That lie was an example of why it's a bad idea for even a beginner to work on spec. As I keep saying here, writing on spec is a gamble — and there are good gambles and bad gambles. In this case, the gamble was a much worse one than was obvious.

If the situation had been as represented — they had the rights and just had to show King Features an acceptable outline to proceed — I might have thought, "Well, that's about a one-in-four chance. That's not so bad." Of course, I still would have had the problem of negotiating my deal from a position of weakness because I'd already invested time in it and they might still offer money I wouldn't accept. But at least I'd have a good sense of the odds if I did decide to gamble.

But in spec situations, you rarely know the odds. The folks asking you to work without guaranteed compensation are rarely candid with you about the odds…and besides, sometimes they don't even know. Often, they're a bit delusional about the chances of their project reaching fruition. I don't know how many times I've heard "This is definitely going to happen" about TV and movie ventures that never happened.

In the case of the Popeye project, they were trying to get free storylines written so they could maybe use them to help impress King Features and secure the rights. Let's say they got ten plots written. I doubt they submitted all ten as part of their presentation. They probably threw all but three or four away. That's very easy to do with writing that you didn't have to pay for.

So they take those three or four outlines and they use them as part of their pitch to King to try and get the rights. Let's say you and I wrote the ones they included in their pitch. They're using our work to try and advance their company's fortunes and we might even help them get that deal…but they have no obligation to us. They can get the rights, dump us and hire someone else.

Or they might not get that deal for reasons that have nothing to do with our storylines. By that time, King might already have licensed the rights to another firm. Or King might think the folks at Vanzetti are crooks or incompetents…as seems to have been the case. Or King might set a price for the rights which Vanzetti could not meet. A hundred other things might happen and in many of those scenarios, no one at King ever even reads our numerous "few pages." So we spent all that time auditioning for a job that did not exist.

There's no way to to calculate the odds but if the above "clean" version of the arrangement was a one-in-four chance, I'd say the real situation was more like one-in-two-hundred or maybe worse. In other words, a bad gamble.

If you're a writer and you want to wager your time on something, you can probably find much, much better opportunities somewhere else. Wagering on your own project instead of someone else's might yield better odds. At the very least, the person in charge of the project (i.e., you) won't knowingly lie to you. Also, you won't charge yourself for parking.

David Daley explains why the Democrats, no matter how well they do in the presidential and senate races, ain't going to take the House.

For a change of pace, this is three women performing "Up the Ladder to the Roof"…

Want some proof that Trump knows he's losing? He's starting to try and drum up support from blacks, having apparently recently learned that they're allowed to vote. Some polls say he's getting about 2% of the black vote so if he can double his following with that group, it still won't do him a lot of good. I doubt he'll even manage that, especially if he keeps making his appeals to black voters from afar, behind podiums at gatherings that are whiter than a Pat Boone Fan Club meeting.

If he wants black people to vote for him he might try actually going and talking to some…but he won't. Trump's best argument that he's winning is the size of his rallies so he never goes anywhere they might not be huuugggge. (It helps to remember that Ross Perot got massive turnouts…and zero electoral votes.) His advocates point out that his rallies are open to people of all color — but as a mainly-Liberal guy, I sure wouldn't feel comfortable at one, even though I'm white and could pass for Republican.

The guy couldn't be doing a much worse job if he stood side-by-side with David Duke and promised free watermelons for all. And knowing him, he might. Philip Bump has more.

Ian Crouch adds to the chorus of voices saying bye-bye to The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore. I said I'll miss the show and I will…though as I think of it, I think what I'll miss mainly is Wilmore's Act One monologue from the desk. Act Two was usually a sketch involving the show's regular contributors…and I liked a lot of those folks and bits, though I thought they had too many contributors. A few less and we might have gotten to know some of them better. And the fact that we didn't made the Act Three round table discussion in each Nightly Show a bit less than involving.

But my quibbles are small and I do think it was a good program. I wish they could have kept it around or at least retitled it The Weekly Show and run it once a week. I suspect part of the problem with the ratings is that Comedy Central programming is skewing younger and raunchier and it just wasn't fitting in.

Leonard Maltin and his daughter Jessie chat with some guy named Mel Brooks.

The first thing you need to know about Jack Riley is that he was a brilliantly funny man. The second thing is that he was one of the nicest people it has ever been my pleasure to know.

You might guess the first one since up until health problems curbed his ability to work and walk, Jack was constantly in demand for comedy shows and the occasional drama. Everybody in the business knew him or knew of him and was aware of how much he could bring to any TV show or movie. If you knew him first as Mr. Carlin, the neurotic complainer on The Bob Newhart Show, you might be surprised (and pleased) to know that wasn't the real Jack Riley. He was not an asshole but he was good at playing one on TV.

Jack was from Cleveland where he spent years on the radio. Around 1965, he relocated to Los Angeles where fellow Clevelander Tim Conway recommended him for performing and writing work. Very soon after his arrival, Jack won a regular slot on a one-season NBC sitcom, Occasional Wife, and then segued to guest shots on dozens of other shows. He was a semi-regular on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, usually doing his great impression of President Lyndon Johnson.

Friends used to kid Jack about having too much work. His close buddy and occasional partner Pat McCormick once said, "Any time I go a week without seeing Riley on TV, I figure he's dead and start writing a eulogy." Jack also enjoyed (if that's the proper word) a vast unpaid career as an emcee at various Hollywood events, including a lot of funerals, including Pat McCormick's.

The last decade or so of Jack's life was marred by bad news and tragedies, including medical problems that put him in a wheelchair and eventually fogged his wonderful brain. It's sad when that happens to anyone and it's a particular heartbreaker when it's someone who was so generous and helpful to others, and so witty. Still, for a time he had that great, expressive voice and his spot-on delivery. He was heard on The Garfield Show a few times, usually playing a callous and uncaring attorney. More often, he played the role of Stu Pickles on Rugrats…and there was a decade or so there when you couldn't turn on the radio without hearing Jack in a commercial.

As I often feel when someone dies after a long period of suffering, I'm sorry to lose him but glad it's over. He died this morning at the age of 80 and the cause is being given as pneumonia. I've lost a wonderful friend and the world has lost a very kind, clever man.

In the last hour, a couple of Trump supporters have sent me a link to this article which says that Trump is only two points behind Clinton. They seem to think it's a brand-new ballgame, that the presidency is anyone's to win and that Trump's gains prove he'll be the victor. They're forgetting two things…

1. The idea of polls is that you consider the totality of them, placing the most weight on the pollsters who've proven to be the best. It's not a matter of finding one whose numbers you like and declaring that the "latest" and therefore only accurate poll. There's always an outlier or two and there is such a thing as a bad pollster. One poll that says what you want to believe does not cancel out all the others that say what you want to ignore.
2. The poll in question in this article is the Zogby Poll. I wouldn't believe the Zogby Poll if it told me it did a through survey and concluded that I have ten fingers. It would more likely say fourteen. Go to the search window on this site, search for "Zogby" and see how many times I've told you it's wildly inaccurate. I don't even believe it when it tells me what I want to believe.

If you're going to follow polls, at least follow an aggregate. The best is Nate Silver's but it wouldn't hurt to look at a couple. If they're all roughly on the same page, that page is probably right. You just have to be willing to deal with what is instead of what you want to have happen.

I spent some time last evening reading some political-type websites and read a lot of opinions about Donald J. Trump and Hillary R. Clinton. Since I want Trump to lose and lose badly, I was amazed at how often I winced at cheap and juvenile attacks on the man. There were plenty about Hillary of course, but there's something really wrong when I think someone's being unfair to a man I don't think has a fair bone in his body.

I won't quote any of them but perhaps you've seen these Naked Trump statues that some artist made and is installing in major metropolitan areas. I get the message but I don't think it's much more profound than an eight-year-old calling someone a doody-head.

You do understand, I hope, that I am not calling for censorship. People have a right to do that kind of stuff. I have the right to say I wish they wouldn't do that kind of stuff.

Then this morning, I awake to read that Trump said…

Sometimes, in the heat of debate and speaking on a multitude of issues, you don't choose the right words or you say the wrong thing. I have done that. And believe it or not, I regret it. And I do regret it, particularly where it may have caused personal pain. Too much is at stake for us to be consumed with these issues.

Well, of course he regrets it. He's seen the polls and what he was doing has him on the verge of losing big and maybe being widely disowned by his own party. And of course, an apology that vague — not specifying what is regretted — is pretty worthless. Sounds to me like the new strategy of the Trump campaign is Good Cop/Bad Cop. Others will call for Hillary Clinton to be hanged in the public square while Trump himself tries to look presidential. Anybody going to buy this? Anyone?

Speaking of comedians who perform what some would consider Bad Taste: Publicist Extraordinaire and Comedy Expert Jeff Abraham sent me this link to a BBC Radio documentary about Lenny Bruce.

Having heard so many comedians I respect hail Bruce as a brave pioneer, I acknowledge his importance in the history of stand-up comedy…but I have yet to hear much that makes me think of him as a great entertainer. Perhaps his best work, along with 99% of all he did, was simply never recorded. Or maybe he's one of those comedians that, well, you had to be there. I don't think any of the videos I've seen of Sam Kinison fully capture what was great about seeing him perform live in an intimate setting.

For years when I was around comedians, I was afraid to say that I didn't find Lenny Bruce funny or even all that clever. It seemed like Comedy Sacrilege. Eventually, I came to realize that others around me felt that way but were not saying it out loud for the same reason. Lately, I hear more and more of them saying it out loud. Of course, even if all he did was to make possible guys like George Carlin and Mort Sahl (back when he was Mort Sahl), that's quite a contribution.

This article may not be a safe link for all workplaces. A writer for Playboy asked various comedians to name offensive and daring jokes and routines they heard and admired by others. I'm kinda surprised at some of the answers.