Monthly Archives: September 2016

David Roel writes to ask…

What are the rules regarding who gets to be a "series regular" and featured in the opening credits? Is it entirely the producers' decision, or can actors' agents negotiate that? Is the difference in what an actor is paid significant? If an actor is not a series regular, is the actor contracted for every individual episode? Have there ever been any fights about this?

I'm thinking about the actress who played Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who, starting from her first episode, was in essentially every episode, had just as much to do as anyone else, but didn't become a series regular, featured in the opening credits, until her very last episode, the episode when her character was killed off. I think I'd be pretty upset if I spent years on a show, did just as much work as any other actor, and never got paid as well as the others, and couldn't put the "series regular" credit on my CV. Could her agent have demanded her promotion?

Payment in excess of union scale is negotiated. The number of episodes appears in is negotiated. Billing in the opening credits is negotiated. (SAG-AFTRA has some rules about billing in the end titles — sadly not about how long a name has to be on screen. Evelyn Wood in her prime couldn't read the end credit on some shows.)

Sometimes, those are very simple negotiations. The actor is offered roughly the same money as others with comparable participation in that show or a comparable show and most of the time, the agent asks for a little more and then they settle on some number in-between. (Where it can get complicated and even nasty is when the show's a hit and the performer wants to renegotiate. Sometimes, the actor winds up like a member of the cast on Seinfeld. Sometimes, the actor winds up like Suzanne Somers.)

Often, the actor is guaranteed all episodes produced. Sometimes, they're guaranteed a certain number or at least a certain number. Usually, you don't get your name in the opening titles unless you're in all the episodes. (I don't recall if Andy Kaufman, who only wanted to be in X episodes of Taxi per season was an exception.) Again, once the actor has some clout and they're afraid of doing the show without him or her, renegotiation may occur.

Most of the time, billing in the opening titles is pretty standard, though there are exceptions. Famously, Russell Johnson and Dawn Wells weren't in the opening titles for the first season of Gilligan's Island but were added as of Season Two. And once upon a time, Jonathan Harris was in every episode of Lost in Space but he was always billed as a "Special Guest Star."

I wanted some more recent examples so I called an agent I know and he said, "There aren't many squabbles these days over billing in the opening of the show. The networks and the producers are pretty good about it and since opening titles are now shorter and less fancy, the actors care less about that." He also said the fights now are rarely about whether someone will get billed but rather over the order of the names and/or who gets single-frame. ("Single-frame" means one name on the screen at a time.)

There's an old saying I just made up about Show Business: "When you're a nobody, nothing is negotiable and when you're a somebody, everything is negotiable." Depending on the contracts, there may have been a point where the agent representing that Buffy actress could have demanded better billing or she'd leave. And then it becomes a question of whether she wants it badly enough to leave the show if she doesn't get it. Since billing doesn't cost them anything, she probably would have gotten what she wanted, just as Jonathan Harris did.

Francis McNamara writes…

First of all, Mark, thank you for being such a creative person in so many ways and also for your insights into the entertainment world on its many genre. As for my question, when you worked on DC's revival of Blackhawk, were there many restrictions or house rules you had to follow?? I enjoyed that whole run very much.

Thanks. Dan Spiegle and I enjoyed doing it a lot…in part because there were no real restrictions. This was in part because the folks then at DC were pretty good about trusting their creative people. (I am not in the previous sentence hinting that other regimes were or are not.) And the other part was that Blackhawk was such a standalone, ignored title that no one else at DC cared much what we did in it since it didn't infringe on their projects.

If we'd been doing Superman or Batman — or even if we'd wanted to guest-star those super-gents — we might have had problems. At any given time, a dozen people at DC have plans for Superman and/or Batman and everyone has ideas about how they should be handled. It was nice not to be enmeshed in any of that.

At the time I was writing/editing Blackhawk, I was writing network TV shows where if you wrote, "Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," you got notes about the word "good," the word "evening," the word "ladies," the word "gentlemen" and your choice of conjunctions, plus whether you were pandering to feminists to put the ladies before the gentlemen. As I think I've written elsewhere here, one of the great joys of writing comic books is that on most projects, between you and the audience are about five people as opposed to five hundred. There are times in my profession when I think I should offer to write the script for free if they'll pay me for the meetings.

Jonathan Chait says — and I quote him because this is my view too — that the allegations of dishonesty against Hillary Clinton are minor and often misreported. There are dozens of unethical charges against Mr. Trump but with some voters, the big things he's done can be ignored while the minor things she's done are disqualifying.

Some of this is just good ol' "it's not a crime when my guy does it." And I do have one acquaintance who wants Hillary jailed and maybe executed, cannot rationally explain her supposed crimes, and who convinces everyone around him that he has a deep emotional problem with powerful women. But that doesn't explain all of the antipathy towards her we see. Here — let me quote the first paragraph of Chait's latest column…

In the last NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, voters judged Donald Trump to be more honest than Hillary Clinton by a ten-point margin. It is a finding that boggles the mind. Americans deem Clinton less honest and trustworthy than a man who lies in public about opponents in both parties with a frequency and brazenness unsurpassed in national politics, who has broken precedent by refusing to disclose his tax returns, who routinely refused to pay contractors for services rendered, who abused a charitable foundation for personal and political gain, who once boasted in a best-selling book about his habit of lying, and who is currently facing trial for bilking thousands of victims in a massive fraud.

You can read the rest of it here. I do think that a lot of people make a gut-level (as opposed to rational) decision about who they'll support in an election and/or just knee-jerk side with the Democrat or the Republican…and then once they do, they believe every bad thing alleged about the opponent and disbelieve (or rationalize) every bad thing alleged about their candidate.

But there has to be more of a reason why "lying about her health" (i.e., waiting for a day or two to disclose she had pneumonia) bothers some people who weren't outraged by Dick Cheney saying, "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us."

The prominent British actor Terence Bayler has died at the age of 86. This obit will tell you more about him, including the fact that he played The Bloody Baron in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

We are interested in his work with Monty Python and in the individual works of the gents who made up Monty Python. We especially note that he thought of and delivered what I think is the funniest single line in all of the Monty Python works. I wrote about it here.

In 1981, the heavyweight Broadway team of Hal Prince, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth created a musical based on the George S. Kaufman-Moss Hart play, Merrily We Roll Along. With all those great names, you'd think, "How bad could it be?" But audiences and critics decided, "Pretty bad." It closed after 52 previews and 16 performances.

Ordinarily, a show that closes that quickly is never seen again…but shows in which Sondheim participated never go away. There are always so many good, even wonderful moments that even if the overall show doesn't coalesce, there are always regional theater groups that think, "We can make this work." I've seen half a dozen productions of it, each tinkering here and there, trying to find some way to fix something that seems worthy of saving. Some have been at least moderately successful.

There's a new documentary about this show and its odd history. It's called Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened and it may be at a theater near you before the end of the year. Here's the trailer…

I'm having trouble finding things to blog about that don't mention Donald Trump. I do get the feeling that even if he loses badly, he will consider the whole campaign a whopping success because it made him the most talked-about person in the country. And since Trump has always had the knack for turning fame into dollars, it will probably prove to be quite lucrative.

I didn't see the Emmy Awards the other night. I've developed an allergy to most award shows — something about experiencing mega-doses of self-congratulation by rich people — plus I just find Jimmy Kimmel to be the least sincere person on TV not on Donald Trump's payroll. Friends who felt like I do about him tell me he's getting better and one of these days, I'll give him another try. I'm sorry they didn't find room in the "In Memoriam" section for folks I was fond of, including Pat Harrington and Marvin Kaplan. Pat was an Emmy winner and a guy who was on a helluva lot of TV shows so I'm inclined to think that was an error, not a judgment of his importance.

Last night, I got an annoying phone call from a political website to which I have in the past donated money. Essentially, it was "Thank you for your past support. Will you give us more right now?" I told the guy that I donate periodically to them and will stop if I get one more of these phone calls. (This was the third or fourth this year.) He said, "I understand and I'll remove you from our list." Fine. But then he added, "But while I've got you here, would you consider helping us out in our pre-election solicitation?"

I spent a few pleasant hours last Saturday down at the Long Beach Comic Convention. It's a fun convention with plenty of cosplayers and not enough parking. I am not actively collecting anything I'm likely to find at one of these but it was fun to be around so many happy and creative people. Boy, there are a lot of comics these days I've never heard of.

The Criterion Collection — which I refer to as the "class act" of home video — is about to bring out deluxe, fancy DVD and Blu-Ray sets of The Valley of the Dolls and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. These are two films I find fascinating for opposite reasons. The first is so unintentionally phony in its dramatics and its manipulation of the audience. The "in-name-only" sequel is intentionally phony in all those ways, so it's quite the hoot, especially if you can see it with a big, hip audience. I first saw "BVD" in a nearly-empty theater at a matinee and didn't much like it. Then I saw it years later with a big audience that got every bit of its deadpan, planned campiness and boy, was that a different movie. And fun!

I'm buying these and I'll watch the special features since Criterion always does those well (even when they hire me) but I'm not sure I'll watch Beyond in my home. It needs at least thirty people in the room to be truly effective. You can order one here and the other here. And by the way, the non-sequel actually does pick up a few of its many storylines from the first one as if it was a real sequel, but those moments are well-disguised.

I'm sure you're all up on the way Donald Trump tried to wrap up the "birther" controversy by declaring that Barack Obama was actually born in the United States. That fact was long obvious to everyone but some people who saw a black man in the White House, thought "he's not one of us" and wanted to believe that he wasn't legitimately the President. I suspect it was even obvious to Trump and a long line of people who saw the opportunity to get cash and/or support from those who wanted to believe it.

Trump's promises that his investigators in Hawaii were digging up stuff "you would not believe" and indicative of his modus operandi: Promise them whatever they want and then worry later about what, if anything, you're going to deliver. I don't know why anyone thinks this man will do anything he says he's going to do…with the probable exception of those promises that would enrich the bank account and power of Donald J. Trump.

Two late night comedians had a lot of fun with all this and it's interesting to compare their approaches and note a few similarities. I thought Seth Meyers was a little sharper than Stephen Colbert but here — you decide which of them made the most of the situation…

Have you heard about this Skittles thing? Donald Trump Jr., who sure takes after the old man, is running around trying to tell people that they're likely to get killed by a Syrian refugee if his pop doesn't get elected. It's the old "vote for us or you'll die" scam.

The Junior Trump posted a photo of a bowl of Skittles and wrote, "If I had a bowl of Skittles and I told you three would kill you, would you take a handful?" He sees that level of risk as analogous to the risk of letting in Syrian refugees. Obviously, the first problem with that is that human beings are not pieces of candy. But as this article notes, the math is also all wrong.

Your odds of getting killed by any sort of refugee (not just a Syrian one) are one in 3.64 billion, not more like one in thirty or forty as the analogy suggests. We do riskier things all day. Your odds of dying in an airplane crash are like one in 11 million. Your odds of dying in a car accident are a lot worse than that.

Someone will probably do the math on this and try to ask Donald Jr. a question like this: "You want to ban Syrian refugees because of the threat they pose to American lives but the availability of assault weapons pose a threat that is X times as great. Should they be banned, too?" X in that equation would not be a small number. Trump would probably reply, "But we need the assault weapons to protect us from that one in 3.64 billion chance that a Syrian refugee will try to kill us!"

As a welcome relief from the politics of the day, I give you…baby pandas!

Jonathan Chait summarizes the new Paul Ryan tax proposal, thusly: "Paul Ryan Tired of Giving Rich People Most of the Tax Cuts, Decides to Give Them All of the Tax Cuts."

If you think that's a misrepresentation, read the analysis of the plan by the non-partisan Tax Foundation. They say the rich pay less and less in taxes under it and the deficit swells to an epic size. Does anyone think that a President Trump would hesitate one second before signing such a thing?

Obviously, I don't want to see Trump win. But I think it would be a little less painful if he won because most Americans understood what he and his kind want to do to this country and wanted that, rather than that they've been convinced that Hillary wants to admit more terrorists into this country.

(And sorry about all this political stuff today. I'm trying to pay less attention to this kind of thing, folks. Honestly, I am.)

Early in 2014, we noted several good days not to be Chris Christie like this one and this one.  Today is an especially good one as the "Bridgegate" scandal trial gets under way. Christie is not on trial in the sense that these proceedings can send him to prison or anything. The ones accused are two of his former officials who apparently arranged for the actual bridge closing. But Christie is on trial in the sense that both the prosecutors and defense lawyers are trying to pin some of the blame on him.

An investigation once yielded the finding that he did not know the closure was deliberately engineered until long after it occurred and he, of course, has steadfastly denied it. But it's odd to see the prosecution insist that he did and even odder to see the defense, representing those who closed the bridge, say yeah, sure, he knew all about it. They will probably be using the phrase "tacit approval" a lot. No wonder Trump didn't pick this guy as his running mate.

I have a personal interest in this that you probably won't care about. I'm a lifelong Democrat, though in the past I did vote for a few Republicans for small offices and sometimes skipped voting because I didn't like either of my choices. I also used to cite a fair number of Republicans as folks I could imagine myself voting for against certain Democrats or wouldn't be upset to see win. I didn't shriek and bemoan the end of the United States of America when the first George Bush won. I thought his advertising — the famed Willie Horton ad — was deliberately deceptive and meant to inflame racial fears (glad no one does that anymore) and he should have lost because of that. But I didn't think he'd be a bad president and I still don't think he was. He was certainly the best President George Bush we ever had.

John McCain, Mike Huckabee and Chris Christie were also, once upon a time, Republicans I could see myself voting for in the right match-up. None of them are on that list any longer. In fact, no one is on that list these days, though I'm nicer about it than certain Republican acquaintances who insist all Democrats are evil and quite intent on destroying America.

What interests me about Christie is like what interested me about the others: Did I just misjudge this person from the start or did they change? Like, I can imagine McCain not being truly caught up in the progressive-hating swamp fever but thinking, "If I'm ever going to be president, I'm going to have to pander to the right-wing nut jobs" and making that move. I don't think that was true of Huckabee. I think all that reasonableness that once impressed me about him was an intentional charade. And I just plain don't know with Chris Christie.

It probably doesn't matter with Christie. All this guy has in his future is maybe a job in the Trump administration (if there is one) and maybe a job on Fox News or doing a right-wing radio show. If he gets indicted for perjury or anything else in this Bridgegate mess, he may not even have those job options. I'm still kinda hoping to get some insight into how much I was duped. If he actually had principles and sold them out for a chance at the presidency, he sure sold them for a longshot.

• Mike Pence says his role model for Vice President is Dick Cheney. Except for that support of Gay Marriage stuff, I'm guessing.

• Mike Pence says his role model for Vice President is Dick Cheney; vows to get his own approval rating down to 13%.

• Mike Pence says his role model for Vice President is Dick Cheney. Do not go hunting with Mike Pence.