I haven't put one of these up for a while but I have all these neat graphics I made…and don't be surprised if you see another one or two this week. Gonna be a busy week. (For those of you who don't know, the can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup signals that Mark may not be posting very often for a day or two, and also that I'll be lousier than usual about answering e-mail.) But before I go off to be busy…
If you're an active member of the Writers Guild of America, you have less than three hours to vote for the Strike Authorization. Please vote for the Strike Authorization. It is not a vote to strike. It's more like a show of unity…a polling of the members to verify that they're behind our current leadership and unwilling to accept a crappy deal. Now, you don't want a crappy offer, do you? Crappy offers are why we sometimes have to strike.
Meanwhile, the nominations are closed for this year's Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing and the recipients will be announced shortly. We received a lot of names this year but — and I mention this as something that makes me curious — a surprising number of them were of people who are ineligible for the award because they've already won it. I wrote…
To date, this award has gone to Arnold Drake, Alvin Schwartz, George Gladir, Larry Lieber, Frank Jacobs, Gary Friedrich, Del Connell, Steve Skeates, Don Rosa, Jerry Siegel, Harvey Kurtzman, Gardner Fox, Archie Goodwin, John Broome, Otto Binder, Bob Haney, Frank Doyle, Steve Gerber, Robert Kanigher, Bill Mantlo, Jack Mendelsohn, John Stanley, Don McGregor, Richard E. Hughes and Elliott S! Maggin. Those folks, having already won, cannot win again.
I thought that was clear but I guess I have to be clearer. There were at least thirty nominations for folks listed in that paragraph, including five for Steve Gerber and the one from the fellow who said it was an outrage that the judges were so "unaware of John Broome's contributions to comics" that we hadn't presented the award to him. This kind of thing puzzles me more than it probably should.
Right-wing pundit Jay Nordlinger lists some of the things conservatives overlook about Trump that outraged them when done by a Democratic president…like playing a lot of golf. A Republican friend of mine used to insist that Obama's frequent usage of the words "I" and "me" proved he was a self-obsessed narcissist who was out of touch with reality. I haven't heard that friend weighing in on Trump's insistence that he really won the popular vote, that he had a bigger turnout for his inauguration than Obama, that he's really popular despite what every single poll says, etc.
A revival of Hello, Dolly! opened in New York the other night. It stars Bette Midler and they will probably sell every seat for every performance until she leaves the show, whenever that will be. I don't think much of Hello, Dolly! as a show but as a vehicle for Ms. Midler's return to Broadway, it's about as perfect a choice as you'll find.
The reviews are all linked on this page where you'll also find a brief video clip of the final bows on opening night.
The race to secure hotel rooms for this year's Comic-Con International commences this Wednesday at 9 AM Pacific Time. You can read all about it here. Good luck. If you should happen to get the one I had last year and you come across a black sock, it's mine.
This is an unusual photo of the prolific TV writer-producer Chris Bearde, who died unexpectedly this morning…of what, I do not know.
It's unusual because he's not laughing in it. I remember Chris laughing at everything I said to him — and that was not because I was so unusually funny. I also remember Chris laughing at everything anyone said to him. I worked on a show with him for Dick Clark and he laughed at everything Dick Clark said, for Christ's sake.
Chris was the producer of the show we worked on together and if you went to him with an idea, he'd howl with laughter, tell you it was brilliant…and often, ten minutes later, decide not to use it because he realized it wasn't funny. I had just come off writing a project for a producer named Alan Landsburg and I'm telling you the honest truth here: It was more pleasant to have Chris Bearde reject your idea than it was to have Alan Landsburg approve it.
You might know the laugh if you ever saw a Chris Bearde show because he rarely produced from the booth. He was almost always down on the stage, just out of the camera's view, howling over everything the performers said and did. I can hear him on reruns of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, The Andy Williams Show, The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, The Hudson Brothers Show and many others.
Chris was born in England, moved to Australia when he was a toddler and as a young adult, bounced around for a time between TV there and TV in Australia. In the mid-sixties, he came to America and later on, he had a kind of dual citizenship, producing shows here and in Canada. His first big TV credit in the U.S. was on Laugh-In and the story about how he got hired goes something like this: Laugh-In hired a British writer who kept turning in lots of very funny material. Eventually, they found out the material was purloined from Chris, who'd worked with this writer on a show in Australia. For some reason, the British guy didn't lose his job — in fact, I think he got a promotion — but they did hire Chris.
At least, that's that way the story is usually told.
After Laugh-In, he did all those other shows I mentioned and a lot that even he would tell you aren't worthy of a mention. He and the recently-also-deceased Chuck Barris created The Gong Show together, then began fighting over every single thing about it, which led to Barris buying out Bearde's interest in the program. Chris disappeared into Canadian TV for a while but he's turned up here a few times in the last decade or three.
I hadn't seen him in person for a decade or two. We kept in touch via Facebook, planned to get together for lunch one of these days, and never did. Let that be a lesson to me. But I always liked the guy and not just because I made him laugh but because he made everyone else laugh.
Oh, and he would have wanted me to mention one person who didn't make him laugh: Donald Trump. Yesterday at 1:50 PM, Chris posted on Facebook…
Thought: There is no way anyone can believe what the Despot says now as a clear pattern is emerging that what ever he's says we can expect a complete reversal as early as an hour later. Absurd as it sounds he probably believes both statements meaning he should immediately be asked to step down as President as his actions are those of a man in a state or paranoid delusion. We are facing Captain Queeg without the brass balls incapable of telling truth from his fiction…
A few hours later, he posted what might have been his last joke…
To many of us looking at the state of the nation..this is "What on Earth day?"
He was a funny, witty man. If you want to know more about him, read the interview he did with our pal Kliph Nesteroff. Or watch a rerun of one of his shows and listen for him amidst the laughter. He's always there.
There's something I've wondered about a WGA strike. During a strike, does a TV or film writer continue to work on their script, knowing that it will be turned in once the strike is over, or do they set it aside and go no further on it because doing so would go against the spirit of the strike?
Official Answer: We all stop writing on WGA-covered material. We can work on novels, comic books, non-WGA animation, poems, magazine articles and such. But if we're in the middle of an assignment for a WGA-covered project, it's "Pencils down!" and we don't add another comma to it.
Honest Answer: A lot of people will add another comma to it…or even finish the script. But as long as it isn't turned-in until the strike is over, no one seems to complain.
Every time I've been on strike since I joined the Guild — that would be 1981, 1985, 1988 and 2007 — I had some WGA job at the time and I just put it on hold. Stopped in the middle of page 23, which is where I was when the strike was called…resumed in the middle of page 23 when the strike was over. I worked on comic book scripts and also on cartoon shows that were not under WGA jurisdiction, and in '88, I also wrote an episode of the Superboy TV show, which was a WGA show that signed an interim agreement with the Guild to remain in production. But I don't think I wrote a word on the WGA-covered projects until the work stoppage stopped.
In two of those four strikes and also in a strike by the Animation Union, the producer of my interrupted-by-the-strike job called and asked me if I would finish the script and hand it in to them surreptitiously. They suggested I drop it off at their home or said they'd send a messenger or meet me at a restaurant so I wouldn't be seen crossing a picket line or entering the studio. I just said, "Sorry. I can't finish it because I can't write until the strike is over." There was some grumbling but they understood.
When the Animation Union was about to go on strike in '79, I was writing scripts for a then-new cartoon studio called Ruby-Spears, working on what would turn out to be one of the shortest-lived cartoon shows ever, a misfire called Rickety Rocket. Among the many things that went wrong with it is that it had to be produced in much less time than you need for something like that. Here's part of a story that I posted here six years ago…
It was an impossible workload for what was then a new, small studio and everyone was working overtime-plus. Not only were airdates looming (the first episode would be broadcast Saturday, September 22) but there was a decent-sized chance that the Animation Union would go out on strike on August 7. Not wanting to chance that a labor action would disrupt delivery dates, Joe Ruby (co-head of the studio) called me in and said, "If we have to, we can get scripts storyboarded and designed outside the union's jurisdiction but we have to get the scripts done before the strike. Can you write six episodes of Rickety Rocket in three weeks?" Usually, we had two weeks to write one script.
I was young and foolish in those days. I'm still foolish but not foolish enough to say yes to a question like that now…but I was then. I wrote six half-hour scripts in three weeks along with other assignments I had at the time, including a variety show for Sid and Marty Krofft. On August 7, not having slept the night before, I drove the sixth of these scripts out to the Ruby-Spears Studio, all the time hoping the strike was not happening…or at least not happening yet. I had enormous quarrels with that union at the time, some of which ended up before the National Labor Relations Board…but I was not going to cross any picket line. Fortunately, there was none outside the building when I got there at 1:45. What I did find was Mo Gollub — a fine gentleman and artist, as well as the president of the union — outside, pulling picket signs out of the trunk of his car. I asked, "Is the studio on strike?"
He said, "Not yet. We're going out at two."
I said, "Any reason I can't hand in a script now?"
He said, "None whatsoever." So I ran inside, delivered the last Rickety Rocket script and then came out and helped Mo finish unloading the picket signs. By 2:05, I was carrying one.
At the same time, I was writing scripts for another Saturday morn show and one of those wasn't finished when the strike commenced. The producer called up and suggested that it would be nice if he woke up the next morning and found the completed script on the front step of his home. I suggested it would be even nicer if I handed it to him in his office a few days after the strike ended and the picket line was gone.
In fact, he called several times to sweetly pressure me to finish the script and get it to him. That strike only lasted about a week so he had his script when he really needed it…but if that had been a month-long strike, I think things might have gotten a tad nasty.
Something like a decade and a half ago, my pal Neil Gaiman wrote American Gods, which is one of those novels that stays with you a long, long time. It's been at least thirteen years since I read it and I recall how stunned I was by the richness of his prose, his ability to blend dark visions with very funny moments, and with his ability to go to chilling places without making me want to look away from the page.
The book garnered much praise, every bit of it deserved…and I have vivid memory of this: The last time I had jury duty, I was sitting in the jury room not being called, working on a script on my iPad. But my attention kept drifting to a gent seated across from me who was reading a copy of American Gods. Watching subtle body language and subtler facial reactions, I could see the book was having a great deal of impact on him. Even in this noisy jury room with all its distractions, the book had his undivided attention.
Whether he liked it or not, I have no idea. But he sure didn't stop reading it, no matter what.
I am told (and am unsurprised) that Neil has turned down a great many lucrative offers since this book was published to move it from paper to the screen. He waited until he had the right offer from the right people…and now it's a series which debuts April 30 on the Starz Network. Last night, I took my splendid friend Jewel Shepard to a premiere screening of Episode 1 and we saw that Neil had indeed entrusted his book to folks who would do it right. At least, Episode 1 is as right as it could be.
It is a lush, visually-stunning translation that is as powerful and penetrating as Neil's own words, many of which (of course) are heard. Many more are unspoken but evident in the amazing art direction. Helming it as exec producers-writers Bryan Fuller and Michael Green, and great credit should also go to all those who contributed to the imagery and effects, as well as the music.
The only thing I didn't like about it was…well, Neil ended his introduction of it by saying, "Sorry about all the blood." So I can't say I wasn't warned but there was a lot of it, especially in the first five minutes. After that, things got better.
The acting is quite wonderful, making the incredible credible. I don't know about future episodes but Ian McShane sure walked off with the first one. Then again, there's a sex scene in there (not involving Mr. McShane) which I won't tip…but at the end of it, the audience burst into stunned applause. You will not forget that scene, especially if at any time in your life, you've actually had sex.
Jewel, Neil and M.E. Neil is the one with the neon halo, not just here but everywhere.
Oh, and come to think of it, there was one other thing I didn't like last night. The opening was bloody and scary and ghastly and I later felt like I had been plunked down in the midst of it at the after-party. Too many folks were crammed into not-enough restaurant and the noise probably had Tijuana calling to ask, "Can you hold it down?" Trapped at its epicenter, I couldn't move, couldn't sit, couldn't hear and couldn't eat. Yes, couldn't eat. Waiters passed among us with trays of finger food and when I asked, "What's in this?," I literally could not hear the answer and therefore had to pass.
I do not understand why in a party where the crowd alone emits a deafening din, someone feels there also needs to be music playing. That is a problem I've encountered not just last night but at many soirées. It's like the organizer is deathly afraid of a spec of silence or, worse, that someone might actually talk to someone else.
So, bottom line: Great show, great writing, great cast, great everything. I'm sure American Gods will be a monster hit. When it airs, watch the first one and that will enslave you to watch the rest. I just suggest that if there's any sort of after-party, you give it a pass. Or bring ear plugs, your own chair, something to read and a bag of chips. (Hey, why not read the book? I may do that again soon.)
My favorite musical comedy is A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and I have been known to travel great distances to see any production of it. Somehow though, I missed this one…
Last night, I was at a show-bizzy event up in Hollywood (tell you about it later today) and I decided to wear my Writers Guild lapel pin.
This led to a couple of folks asking me how things would turn out as we vote for a Strike Authorization. I said I was sure the Strike Authorization would pass but I really have no feel for how wide the margin will be. If it's 51%-80%…well, that won't be so good. It won't lead to the Producers making an offer sufficient to avert a work stoppage. The lower ends of that range would probably mean no strike or one that didn't last long; that would collapse quickly, especially if the Producers bettered the offer by a token amount.
A Strike Authorization of 85% or above might prompt the AMPTP to lay down an acceptable offer. Then again, it might not. People in power do not always do wise things. Management erred greatly with its "final offer" in '88 that led to that strike. Someone had badly misgauged the spirit of the guild then. I'm sure some lawyer said, "Don't worry. There's no way they'll turn this down" and then we turned it down by 90-something percent and the Producers began fighting amongst themselves, unable to budge enough off their "final offer" for months.
There's sometimes a human, often-stubborn element to these matters. We've all seen politicians say or do unwise things…and then when it becomes apparent it ain't working, they double-down rather than admit error. I remember an agent who wanted to be my agent, who was pitching me on dumping my guy and signing with him. He kept telling me how tough he was. As I've mentioned, I find people who keep telling you how tough they are to be very dangerous. They're dangerous if they really are as tough as they say and they're even more dangerous when it turns out, as it so often does, that they aren't.
He kept saying things like, "When I set a price, I have the balls to never budge from it" and "I will kick these guys in the nuts for you." He even said, "In this business, you have to make them pay good money to see your cock" and I laughed because we were in Nate n' Al's Deli and Milton Berle was across the room. I pointed and said, "I think you want to go sign him!"
Everything was a dick reference with this guy and while I didn't go with him, I know someone who did and regretted it. That person said, "It was never about making a good deal with this man. It was always about proving his schmeckel was bigger than someone else's." Which, of course, means that it probably wasn't.
So you don't know. You just don't know. You can know that you're staking out the position that will logically be better for All Concerned, even the employers. But you can't always be sure they'll see it that way or that they'll do what financially makes sense for them. They have internal conflicts about which we know little.
The aforementioned lapel pin. Photo by me, just now in my closet.
I can tell you this, though: The Writers Guild has a basic, fundamental problem. I wholeheartedly support the organization, in large part because I've written for TV with it (on live-action shows) and without it (most animation). I know how hard it is to (a) get a good deal and (b) have the employers honor it when they're only afraid of you and not you and your union. Disney on a WGA deal is a much different company than Disney on non-WGA work.
Still, we have this occasionally-visible structural defect: The Guild covers all kinds of writers. It covers folks who write movies, who write TV, who write comedy, who write drama, who write episodic, who write one-shots, who write soaps, who write game shows, etc.
When an offer comes in that's good for TV writers and bad for screenwriters, there's understandable division within our ranks. When I was mainly writing variety shows, I felt my needs were neglected because the main issues addressed at the bargaining table were all about sitcoms and/or features. There just weren't that many of us writing variety shows.
More relevant is that the WGA covers writers who have vastly different economic situations. Your top, most-in-demand writers work for way above Guild Minimums such that an increase in those minimums may not affect them much. The main issue that prompts strikes is how much, if at all, to increase said minimums.
You also have writers who are, for example, actors 95% of the time and writers the remaining 5% of the time. Or who write novels 93% of the time and Guild-covered work the other 7%. Or are really producers who've joined because they got a few writing credits. Last strike, I marched with one friend whose income plunged instantly to 0 when we went out, and one friend whose income didn't change because at that moment, it was all coming from writing comic books. And later, I marched with a writer-producer who clearly was thinking like a guy on the right-hand side of that hyphen.
Finally, you have the big divide, which is that most writers either think of themselves as someone who works constantly in TV and movies or someone who is going painfully underemployed in those areas. When the subject of "Strike!" arises, they tend to think that their group is the one that has it all on the line.
Writers who work a lot say, "We're the ones who are walking out on actual jobs, whose current projects may get scuttled, who will incur the wrath of the Producers for our stance. We're the ones who lose real dollars, whereas the guys who weren't working…well, they have other sources of income. The Producers aren't missing their services. They're walking out on jobs they never had in the first place."
At the same time, you have the writers who aren't working much…or at all. They'll tell you, "We're the ones who are suffering. The guys who work all the time…they have income from residuals. Some of them can spend the strike writing scripts at home that know they'll get paid for as soon as the strike ends. They have money in the bank to live off. I'm losing out on a job that I was about to get and I can't pay my mortgage without it."
Many of them have a spec screenplay or pilot that they believe/hope is close to a life-changing sale and that can't happen while we're on strike. Plus, they figure that when the strike ends, there'll be a flood of spec pilots and screenplays into the marketplace from the top writers, selling stuff they wrote at home during the strike. That, they expect, will freeze out their projects.
There's some truth to the thinking on both sides. There's greater truth though in the view that if one grouping of writers gets screwed, that does not augur well for any writer. I have about nineteen reasons for wanting there to not be a strike and one of them is that I don't want to have to keep giving everyone, including myself, the "we're all in this together" speech.
The first hundred or two hundred times I had to do that, I felt like Ben Franklin in 1776 saying that if we don't all hang together, we should most assuredly hang separately. After a while though, it becomes dreary and even painful to keep repeating that, especially to a friend who's terrified he may lose his house.
But in the mumble-mumble years I've been doing this — oh, why hide it? I've been a professional writer (and really nothing else) since 1969 — I've learned you have to say no a lot. If you don't, you just screw yourself. So vote Yes on the Strike Authorization and hope that almost all of us do.
I don't know if there's going to be a strike but I do know the three things that are almost always true in my line of work. One is that when they say "it's a done deal," it is not a done deal. The second is that when they say "I'll get back to you," they won't get back to you.
And the third is that if you take a bad offer today, you get a worse one next week and an even worse one the week after…and they'll just keep getting worse and worse until you absolutely have to say no. So it's much, much easier and more cost-efficient to just say no to the first bad one.
If you're setting your TiVo or similar device and you get the Starz network, set it to record a special called Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg, which has been running all month and is next being telecast on April 30. It's a great show about a great talent in the world of stand-up comedy. I wrote here about how important Robert Klein was and this special has folks like Jon Stewart and Jay Leno saying a lot of the same things.
Years ago on this site, I had a piece about how some friends of mine and I had made a list of the Top Ten Stand-Up Comedians of all time. It was, in no particular order: Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Mort Sahl, George Carlin, Jackie Mason, Richard Pryor, Shelley Berman, Bob Newhart, Lenny Bruce and Robert Klein. If you disagree with this list, fine…but you might not if you read the criteria via which we arrived at it.
Now: Carlin, Pryor and Bruce have died. Berman is retired and in poor health. Sahl and Mason are almost retired and, to be as polite as I can be about this, their admirers seem somewhat embarrassed by their current acts. Allen left stand-up long ago. Cosby has…well, let's just say "problems." The only two on that list who still perform and who demonstrate why they were ever on a list like that to begin with are Newhart and Klein. Newhart is 87 and probably won't want to work much longer…but Klein still tours and he's still great and if you've never seen him live, you really oughta.
You might want to set your TiVo or similar device for next Monday. That's when Independent Lens, a PBS series that showcases documentaries, is running The Last Laugh, a film about folks trying to be funny about The Holocaust. Among those discussing that delicate topic are Rob Reiner, Harry Shearer, Sarah Silverman and (of course) Mel Brooks. I haven't seen it but it sounds worth recording.
It has been announced that this year's Tony Awards ceremony will be held on June 11 and that they'll be hosted by Kevin Spacey. He's kind of an odd choice, not that he's not a distinguished actor and a funny guy. But not since 1994 has the show been hosted by someone who wasn't thought of as a musical performer. I'm guessing the Tony folks wanted him because they thought it might snare some viewers who only know from movie stars…and he wanted to do it because he thought it would make him a contender to host the Oscars. He'll probably be very good.
I'm kinda waiting for the posting of Keith Olbermann's daily video rant. Given the news about Bill O'Reilly, Keith has to be among the happiest people on the planet. Stephen Colbert sure did well with the topic last night. I have the feeling we're going to hear from Jon Stewart very shortly.
Let us not forget that Fox News did not rid itself of Mr. O'Reilly because they were appalled at his behavior. They did it because it became public and advertisers were starting to desert him.
It really doesn't matter to me much that Bill O'Reilly has lost that show. Tucker Carlson, who's getting the time slot, has become just as insufferable and undedicated to being reasonable or factual…and of course, O'Reilly will find another job soon enough. What is nice is the message sent to men who act abominably with women that even if you're rich and powerful, you can be caught and exposed and humiliated. I'm afraid though that some of them will think, "Hey, if I get the kind of severance package O'Reilly got, fine!"
I couldn't make it to the Writers Guild information meeting tonight but I've read enough to do what I just did, which was to vote for the Strike Authorization. That's not a good name for it — it's more like a Threat Authorization — but by any name, it's essential. If you're a member, you have until Noon on Monday to vote, which you can do at the WGA website.
If you're on the fence, there's a good 14-minute video there in which Negotiating Committee Co-Chair Chris Keyser explains what's going on and what's at stake. It says some of the same things I said here but better and with a greater focus on what's going on in the bargaining sessions. You can find the link to it after you log in with your name and member number.
Please vote and please vote yes. Our negotiators can't bring back a good deal unless there is a show of support from the membership behind them.
