Monthly Archives: June 2017

An unusual approach to the cups and balls trick. This is Yann Frisch…

This time, I've got about twelve minutes…

• "Trumpism," as Kevin Drum notes, is becoming the new trend in politics. It's based on the premise that you can put out deliberate lies and also hide things that the public has a right to know…and you can still win. Winning, in fact, is the only thing that matters. You can even lose and as long as you lie and insist you're winning, a lot of your supporters will believe it.
• People around Trump are suggesting he fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller and put an end to the whole Russia investigation. He would cite James Comey's statement that he [Trump] was not under investigation and say, "That shows there's nothing to investigate" and shut the thing down. Of course, that ignores the fact that (a) Comey said there was no investigation of Trump at that moment, not forever…and (b) the Special Counsel is supposed to investigate many Trump associates. Matt Yglesias has more…but clearly, someone thinks Trump — unlike Nixon and his Saturday Night Massacre — could survive the outrage, especially with a Republican Congress.
• Sarah Kliff sees a real possibility that the Senate will sneak in a health care bill with no public debate and no scoring and get it through, thereby repealing most of Obamacare, gutting Medicaid, leaving lots of poor and middle-class folks with no affordable insurance or way higher premiums.  Then they will be able to give the rich that huge tax cut that seems to be the point of all this. They're counting on no one realizing for at least a few elections what they've done or that they'll blame Democrats for it.
• And Paul Krugman says that the Republicans are doing this thing to our health care because they want to do it and they can, with no pretense or theory that it will make anyone but the very rich better off.

John McCain says "American leadership" on the global stage was better when Obama was president than it is now. Back when there were actually people in this country who respected John McCain, that might have been significant.

As invariably happens the morning after a big award show, you have folks all over the Internet saying, "Worst Oscars/Emmys/Grammys/Tony/Whatever ever!" Awards shows are rarely as good as we want them to be but we keep forgetting that and imagining that last year's — which they hated the next day — was wonderful. That always bugs me a bit as does when folks complain that the wrong people were nominated and the wrong people won, like that's the fault of the producers of the telecast.

I thought Kevin Spacey was an okay host. I may be the only person who likes him better as Kevin Spacey than as Bill Clinton, Johnny Carson or Jack Lemmon. The opening number was probably a bit of a muddle to the more than 95% of viewers, myself included, who haven't seen all the referenced shows…but that's an intrinsic problem for the Tonys: They're about shows that few viewers have seen and about the people involved in them. There's not much anyone can do about that except to not start off the show by leaving so many of us out of the gags.

Once they got down to presenting awards and excerpts, the festivities went pretty well. I still don't get why Bette Midler couldn't do some number from Hello, Dolly! If they couldn't do the title song because of logistics, how about…oh, say, any of the seven other numbers she sings during it? I guess since tickets are scarcer than a straight choreographer, the producers weren't worried about not having an exciting, showy number on the Tony Awards. David Hyde-Pierce doing the cut song that's been added back into the show might have been the least commercial sampling they could have presented.

Hero of the night? Whoever thought of having Spacey (and it may have been Spacey) deliver that great line about Bette Midler as President Underwood. Wonder what he would have said there if she hadn't gone on and on thanking people.

(And did you notice? The camera cut to various folks in the audience laughing and one of them was Les Moonves, CEO of CBS. Moonves is the reason she was able to do that. Not all that long ago, the Tony telecast was on a rigid time schedule and not allowed to go even thirty seconds over its allotted slot. Moonves did away with that rigid timing.)

Some of the speeches were really good. Some of the numbers were really good. The whole thing felt long but 3+ hours of that kind of thing will always feel long. It was nicely produced. Our buddy Ken Levine was there for the rehearsals and he has a good post up about how utterly impossible it is to do a show like this…but they do it. Rachel Bloom's little spots, which included coping with some rude and unprofessional folks entering or exiting the stage, were even fun.

All in all, if I had to judge this Tony Awards Broadcast, I'd go out on a limb and say it was a Tony Awards Broadcast — no more, no less. I look forward to next year when we'll hear the folks calling it "the worst ever" call next year's "the worst ever" and lament that it wasn't as good as the marvelous one this year.

A baby sloth doing nothing. Sloths do nothing so well…

This is a series of articles I've written about writing, specifically about the problems faced by (a) the new writer who isn't selling enough work yet to make a living or (b) the older writer who isn't selling as much as they used to. To read other installments, click here.

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If you want to have a career as a writer, it is very important that you not look desperate. If you are, do what you can to conceal it…and yes, I know that might not be easy, especially if you're really, really desperate.

This applies to the wanna-be writer who hasn't sold much, if anything. It also applies to the once-established writer who's hit a career lull and hasn't sold anything in a while. It's probably more important for the latter. If you're new in the business, you have more of an excuse for appearing desperate. People who might hire you or buy your work can think, "No one's given this kid a chance." If you have some credits then what they're going to think is: "Gee, people have given this guy a chance and if he's now this desperate, maybe his work isn't that good lately."

Desperate people make others uncomfortable. We try to avoid them for the same reason we sometimes give money to homeless people on the street so they'll go away. But in The Arts, we don't usually give jobs to desperate people to lessen their desperation because they may not be able to do those jobs. In fact, we often suspect the reason they're desperate might be because they just don't have it in them to do those jobs. And if we give them those jobs and it turns out they can't do them, that creates bigger problems for us.

And unlike the homeless guy outside the CVS Pharmacy who went away after you gave him a buck, these people tend not to go away. They come back again and again begging for another chance.

So you don't want to look desperate and one good way to achieve that is to not be desperate, at least financially. We've discussed that in previous installments of this column.

The story I'm about to tell you is is not about a writer. It's about a guy who was doing (or trying to do) cartoon voices but it's the same situation. Because I was casting voices for a cartoon show I was writing and producing, he came after me seeking work. He came after me at conventions, via e-mail, and then when that didn't work, he started phoning me.

He was not without talent. He had enough that he'd landed an agent…but there are agents and there are AGENTS. He had an all lower-case agent, one of those who has limited clout or connections to sell anything. There are agents like that who represent writers, too. They'll take on almost anyone who looks competent enough to maybe someday get a job, then they do almost nothing to make that happen. If the client somehow manages to get a gig through his or her own contacts and campaigning, the agent will step in, close the deal and take their commission.

(What kind of agent do you want? The one who is in touch with the people who do the hiring, be they producers, directors, casting people or whatever. You want the agent who can and will get those people on the horn and say, "Trust me. You've got to meet with [YOUR NAME HERE] because this kid has really got something!" And then the hiring person thinks, "Gee, that agent represents some really good people. It probably won't waste my time to take a meeting with that client!" If it's an agent of the "anyone who looks competent" criteria…well, that agent probably can't get that buyer on the phone and if they do, their recommendation means very little.)

In the world of voiceover in Hollywood, there are about fifty-five agencies. About nine of them represent about 90% of all the actors who work a lot. They're the top agencies that represent the top people. I won't list these agencies but if you go to voicebank.net, you can browse the demos of most voice actors and find out who their agents are. There, you can easily look up the superstar cartoon voice actors and see which agencies represent a significant number of them. You can also hear the demos.

I'll leave it to you to figure out who the superstar cartoon voice actors are.

Tomorrow, if I was hired to cast voices for a new cartoon show and I wanted submissions of candidates to consider, I'd make a list of the actors I want to audition because I think they'd be right for the show. They would probably all be with one of those nine or so agencies. When I called to book them for auditions, I would also let the agents recommend other clients, especially those new to the marketplace, that they'd like me to consider.

In the highly-unlikely event that I couldn't cast the show with those nominations, I might call a few of the other agencies…though I don't think I ever have.

For the sake of this story, I'm going to refer to the actor who took to nagging/stalking me as Herbert. Herbert was not with one of those nine-or-so agencies and indeed, throughout his relentless campaign to get work out of me, the agent he did have never once called me to make a personal pitch for Herbert. It probably would not have mattered if he had.

Herbert introduced himself to me after one of my Cartoon Voices panels at Comic-Con. He talked a mile a minute about himself, telling me how talented he was and quoting others as saying how talented he was. Call those Mistakes #1 and #2.

If someone's trying to sell you a used car, a high-pressure sales pitch usually makes you suspicious of the product and it's the same if the product is someone's talent. Your high opinion of your work is meaningless. I mean, it's not like you're an unbiased critic of you. Some really lousy people think they're terrific and that kind of self-promotion can also suggest ego problems that might make the person difficult to work with.

Also, Herbert said, "I studied with [NAME OF VOICE TEACHER] and he said I was the best student he'd ever had." I had never heard of that teacher but even if I had, the same questions would have rapidly came to mind…

1. Did this teacher really say that?
2. Was this teacher trying to get you to pay them for an advanced course or more lessons when they said it?
3. Or just being nice? Or trying to get rid of you nicely by telling you what you wanted to hear? It's easy to say such things when you don't have to back them up by hiring someone.
4. And most of all, why should I care what that person thinks? What matters here is my opinion. I'm not going to hire you because they liked you.

Herbert, of course, had a CD of his work in hand which he wanted me to listen to. I gave him a business card with my P.O. box address and told him to mail it to me so I wouldn't have to carry it around. (These days, we don't even use CDs. Today, he'd give me a business card telling me where I could go online to listen to his demo.)

That wasn't enough for him. He began doing voices for me, then and there. I stopped him and said, "I don't do auditions in convention halls and besides, I have another panel to get to." He thanked me about eighteen times and let me go.

Fifteen minutes later, I had an e-mail on my iPhone from him. It thanked me for the nineteenth time and gave me a direct link to hear his demo online.

Okay, fine. The kid's enthusiastic and more than a little pushy. Simple logic would tell you that doesn't mean he isn't a good voice actor.  But I have to tell you — and maybe this is unfair — I assumed he probably wasn't that good or he wouldn't have had to resort to this kind of in-your-face salesmanship to get a job. I am not at the top of the voice-hiring business. I am darned close to the bottom and haven't cast a show in over a year. It's not my main line of work; more like an occasional adjunct to my writing career. If he was coming after me this way, it meant he'd probably struck out repeatedly with the folks who cast lots of shows and probably with all the top agents, as well.

That was Saturday at the convention. Sunday morning, when I awoke and checked my e-mail, there was another message from him. He wanted to know if I'd heard his demo yet and if so, what I thought of it. At the end, he added in one of those "jokes" that you just know the person is making to try and plant a serious idea. He wrote, "Do you have a series yet I can star in?"

Later that day at the con, I ran into two agents from one of the best of the ten agencies and I started to ask them, without mentioning his name, "What do you do when you have a guy who's nagging you to death to listen to his demo and maybe represent him and telling you how brilliant he is?"

One of them instantly said, "Herbert." Then the other one said, "I was thinking of Herbert but it could also have been…" and she mentioned four or five other names. Then the two of them engaged in a short debate over which of the wanna-be clients who pestered them was the biggest pest. If I wanted to be a cartoon voice actor, I don't think it would be good for me to get myself on a list like that.

I asked them both, "If someone is like that, what are the chances you'll listen to his demo and decide he's really good and you should sign him up?"

One of them said, "Zero." The other said, "It could happen but I can't think of when it ever has." Neither one could explain for me the connection between overselling and not being good enough in the talent department, though one added, "When I think back over all the really good people who came to us, not one of them came to us that way."

Herbert e-mailed me every day to ask what I thought of his demo. I finally gave it a listen and it wasn't bad…but "not bad" is not enough in that business; not when you're competing with people who are "real good." On the show I was then doing, I had a talent pool full of "real good" — four or five regulars plus about twenty people I occasionally used in guest roles. Based on his demo, there wasn't a thing Herbert could give me that one of them couldn't do — as well or better.

I told him that in a return e-mail in polite but firm terms. He responded by calling me, thereby upping the level of pushiness. He wanted to convince me he had new voices and skills that weren't on his demo. He called me a few times and hit on me at other conventions before I finally had to tell him to leave me alone. The last time, I said, "And if you keep annoying people the way you're annoying me, no one will ever give you a break." That, he understood and I haven't heard from him in a few years, nor have I heard a thing about him. He is not listed among the actors on Voicebank.

As I said, it's not completely logical that a guy who's too desperate will turn out to not be too talented but it seems to happen most of the time…and if that overly-brash guy turns out to be talented, the way he behaves can still make you wonder, "Do I really want to work with this person?" When we're talking about writers, I think those who hire tend to respect the writer who doesn't engage in the ol' hard sell and who lets the work speak for itself. Sometimes, it may just be because they're a refreshing change from all the Herberts out there.

• A lot of folks seem to think Batman died yesterday. Adam West wanted you to remember he was an actor, not a comic book character.

Since the Tony Awards are tonight, we're in a show tune kinda mood.  Here's the opening number from Fiddler on the Roof as performed by an Australian company. That's Anthony Warlow as Tevye…

I have twelve minutes before I have to leave for a dinner engagement. Let's see how many links I can get up here in that time…

• Did Trump really promise "100%" that he'd testify under oath against James Comey? That's what the headlines say but Andrew Prokop says it's not that clear. Also, take note of this nice bit of evasion: Asked if there were tapes, he said, "I'll tell you about that over a very short period of time" and "You're gonna be very disappointed when you hear the answer."
• You know that defense that some of Trump's allies are using; that he's new at the job and any rules he's breaking are just because he doesn't know better? That might fly if we'd hired a new janitor and he hasn't learned yet that whether styrofoam goes in the recycling bin or not…but this is the Presidency of the United States we're talking about. Fred Kaplan thinks that excuse is pretty terrifying, maybe worse than if they just admitted he's a criminal.
• Eric Levitz lists some pretty awful things Trump did lately, some of which are getting crowded out of the headlines by the other awful things he's done.
• Benjamin Wallace-Wells on the problems the White House is having in its mission to discredit James Comey.  For one thing, I think Trump has way overused the argument that any news item that isn't totally favorable to him is Fake News.  Even folks who want to believe in him are going to stop believing that about everything.

That's all I have time for. I thought Bill Maher did a good job of defusing the controversy about "that word" and apologizing with good sincerity. The folks who wanted him off the air anyway won't back down but I don't think this scandal has much more mileage in it. Then again, I didn't think it was that big a deal in the first place.

Adam West…sigh. Real nice man. I was tapped to interview him at a couple of comic book conventions and at one of them, we wound up having a dinner during which neither one of us mentioned Batman at all. From the way we didn't talk about it, I got the feeling he considered it a mixed blessing. It made him very famous. I don't think it made him very wealthy, at least at the time. Decades later, it was the autograph circuit that did that.

When he signed on for the role, he was a working actor who probably wasn't working enough. He had some good roles but he hadn't really distinguished himself; hadn't cut himself away from a herd of other handsome leading men types in his age bracket. Batman finally set him off from the others but for that, he paid a high, immediate price. It only lasted three seasons, getting very hot and then very cold in a very short span of time. Once it was off, it was Adam West's career that got very cold. He was a fine, versatile talent but he was too associated with that character and with a style of deliberately bad acting which no one wanted in their show or movie.

The first time I met Adam was at the Comic-Con in San Diego in 1986, I think. The Batman movie which would star Michael Keaton had been announced but Keaton had not been cast. No one had, nor had the film been green-lit for production. Adam was not a guest of the con. He had driven down to San Diego and maybe even paid admission, just to walk around the hall and try to drum up support for him to be cast in the role.

He had assumed — wrongly — that anyone who loved Batman considered him the definitive actor to play the part and that we'd all rally behind him. The presence of Adam West at the con drew very little interest and zero groundswell.

Back then, I don't think too many fans remembered that show fondly. It was, after all, a show that ridiculed the property — it was nominated for an Emmy for Best Comedy Series, remember — produced in large part by people who thought the comic books were stupid and those of us who bought them were stupider. We didn't know much about the then-pending Batman feature but we did know that it was supposed to be the antithesis of the TV show. The Casting Call, if there was one, probably said they were seeking anyone who wasn't Adam West.

He didn't get the part…or very many others around then but time changes how we view some things. Maybe it was just inertia. Maybe it was because as mainstream media began taking comic book characters more seriously, we who loved comics felt less threatened by one spoof. Maybe some people even felt that the move towards a darker, grittier Batman took the character too far to that side and the show Adam had done represented when Batman was more fun and less psychotic.

Pick one or come up with your own reason that the show became beloved and that folks lined up to pay for his signature, as well as that of his co-stars. At the first con where I interviewed him, West and Frank Gorshin were there on a guarantee of a very impressive number of dollars…and they way exceeded their guarantees. At about the same time, producers and directors who'd been tots when Batman was on began trying to hire Adam West for non-Batman roles, just because they loved him and wanted to work with him. (I should mention here that his career was also helped a lot by an agent named Fred Wostbrock, whose obit — sadly — was posted here last November.)

Adam West lived and survived long enough to become a genuine, in-demand superstar…and he deserved it. Like I said, he was a real nice man and a much more able actor than any line of that TV show required. Aside from the parts about him and his agent dying, this is a pretty happy ending.

A hedgehog and a dog…

I awoke this morning with a foolish thought: I'd do a blog post not about You-Know-Who. 'Twas a foolish thought because no matter what the man is bad at, he's real good at making it all be About Him. In fact, we start with an Ezra Klein article that addresses that very point…

• Ezra Klein makes the point that "Trump's secret isn't that he lies. It's that he crowds out the truth." I think that's quite true. And if he keeps saying "I'm winning" enough, a certain amount of his supporters will continue to believe that.
• Eric Levitz discusses the logic — or lack of any — in the Trump team's response to yesterday's testimony by James Comey.
• Ed Kilgore believes that if it comes down to a contest of personal credibility — Trump's versus James Comey's — Donald ain't got a prayer.
• Jeffrey Toobin thinks that what Comey presented was a portrait of inarguable Obstruction of Justice by Donald J. Trump.
• Jeet Heer makes the point I've made many times, which that Trump is incapable of even thinking about what's good for the country. The only concern that ever gets into his head is what's good for Donald Trump.

Bill Maher is on tonight with his first show since last week's when he used That Word. He has some black guests who are reportedly going to give him a hard time about it. This sounds like one of those situations that will change no minds but could make for entertaining television in the same manner that the World Wrestling Entertainment Network offers it. Since Maher will have home court advantage (including an audience of his fans), I'd bet the spread.

Much was made in today's hearings about the possibility that Trump, like Nixon before him, had his office bugged so there are recordings of his conversations with James Comey. Trump tweeted the above not long ago in what looked like an attempt to intimidate Comey into shutting up.

I like one thing about that tweet. I like that Trump put the word "tapes" in quotes like I just did. I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt and praise him for reminding us that if there are recordings, they probably aren't tape recordings. That technology is as obsolete as presidential decorum. They'd be digital recordings. We should remember that and also that digital recordings are not only easier to store than tapes, they're also easier to edit, doctor or delete.

Which brings me to my main point: Isn't it kinda obvious that Trump has no such recordings? He'd know if there were any and he didn't say he had them.

And yes, I agree: This man can be quite illogical at times, even to the point of self-inflicting serious wounds on his integrity and the chances of passing legislation he desperately wants passed. But he's also paranoid about the world finding out too much about himself and his businesses. He would think, "Hey, even a sly guy like Nixon couldn't prevent his tapes from becoming public, warts and all."

Nixon was damaged by the revelations from his tapes that he'd conspired to obstruct justice. He was also humiliated by the language on the tapes and his anti-Semitic ramblings. Would any Trump supporter like to wager that Trump hasn't said things in the White House he would not like to have posted for all to hear on YouTube? It would be like that Access Hollywood video times a thousand.

Anyway, if he did have recordings of Comey there would be two possibilities: The recordings exonerate Trump or they condemn him. Since his staff has recently been busy spreading the premise that James Comey is a no-good filthy liar and Trump clearly is desperate to convince America of that, he's not sitting on incontrovertible evidence that Comey is just that. He's not waiting until his approval rating slips four more points and Republicans in Congress start deserting him or at least distancing themselves from him. He'd have that audio out and everywhere faster than you could say, "H.R. Haldeman."

Trump's lawyer is out there right this minute saying that certain things Comey said were said weren't said…like Trump's demands of loyalty. Even Trump backers are going to demand that Trump produce his "tapes" and prove that Comey should be prosecuted for lying to Congress. Trump will either have to release them or he'll have to say, "I never said there were any recordings. I don't know of any." Right?

Like most of you, I watched most of former FBI Director James Comey's testimony this morning. You could kind of understand why Comey had the job as long as he did and why he lost it. He had it because he's really good at speaking guardedly, not allowing questioners to bait him into saying more than he wants to say and then where possible, passing the buck to others. I doubt anyone could function in that environment without that skill.

Comey did great damage to Trump though not as much as he would have if he hadn't repeatedly declined to say whether or not Trump committed an Obstruction of Justice. Since he did say he felt he'd been pushed to drop the investigation of Michael Flynn, we know what he would have said if he'd answered that question…but that, he said over and over, will be left to the Special Counsel to determine. And he has total confidence in that Special Counsel.

After Trump, the person to whom he did the most damage was probably Attorney General Jeff Sessions. And then John McCain embarrassed himself by appearing a bit addled, unable to understand how the FBI could possibly conclude an investigation of a Democrat on one matter without also concluding one of a different matter at a different time involving a Republican. McCain is a man who believes in perpetual wars and perpetual "investigations" of his enemies.

I don't see Comey as a hero. Whatever his reasons, he clearly did something sloppy and contrary to policy with his announcement about reopening the investigation into Clinton's e-mails. He is testifying now so the narrative of his relationship with Trump and his firing are not successfully spun to paint him as sinister or inept. I didn't see a lot on my TV to respect, either from the questioners or the questioned. What I saw was another chapter in a story that's got a long way to go.

Our friend Misty Lee is putting together a new magic show and she's keeping a video diary of the process.  On Day 1, which we linked to here, they held auditions for new assistants.  On Day 2, which you can see below, the auditions continue…

Donald Trump's job approval is down to 37.9% against a disapproval rating of 56.2%. I'm going to guess he won't get much below 30% until one or both of two things happen…

One is that he will look like enough of a train wreck that Republicans in Congress start turning on him and distancing themselves. I kinda disagree with the premise that Trump could start confessing to murders and guys like Paul Ryan would still support him. I think right now, Trump isn't unpopular enough for that. Ryan still has to deal with him, still wants Trump to support and sign legislation that's on the Ryan wish list. But if the early exit of Trump were to start looking inevitable — which it doesn't at this time — I think Ryan would be perfectly happy and probably even happier with President Pence. In which case, Ryan would join those shoving Donald out of the Oval Office, A.S.A.P.

Secondly, I think Trump's supporters need a new champion. They're not going to abandon their man until they have somewhere else to go. As the old saying goes, you can't beat something with nothing. Nothing will cause the Trump lovers to switch their love to nobody. But they might switch it to someone who promised them all the things they think Trump will do for them, actually do them, and do them without all the embarrassing statements and lies which they have to ignore or rationalize.

Tomorrow, Trump's popularity will probably take another hit as James Comey testifies. Ben Mathis-Lilley explains what it's about.