Monthly Archives: January 2018

The folks who form Voctave sing a song from West Side Story…

For some reason, I've recently begun to have trouble with online ticket merchants. Most small theaters contract with an online company to sell their seats. That makes sense but it means that when you get to the theater and discover there's a problem with your tickets, they say, "We can't do anything to correct this situation. You'll have to discuss that with the online company." And there are two things wrong with that from the customer's position, one being that Customer Service at the online company is usually closed in the evening — you know, just when you're at the theater and you discover a problem with your tickets.

And the other thing wrong with that is that when you get in touch with them the next day, the online company says, "We're sorry but we can't do anything to correct this situation after the event has transpired." In other words, "You should have contacted us when you didn't know something was wrong." If you press the matter further, all you get is "We can't do anything to correct that. You'll have to take that up with the theater." All the companies I've checked that sell tickets on the web have a policy statement somewhere on their site that basically says they will never give you a refund for any reason — no way, no how — especially after the event has taken place.

That's not exactly true. I have persuaded some sellers and theaters to correct mistakes but they kind of reserve the right to not fix them and they do not make it easy to fix them. At times, the back-and-forth between theater and ticket seller remind me of when I worked for Hanna-Barbera…

If I had a problem with something the studio did, I'd go to Joe Barbera and tell him and he'd say, "I'm not in charge of that. You'll have to take it up with Bill." So I'd go to Bill Hanna, tell him and hear him say, "I'm not in charge of that. You'll have to take it up with Joe." It took me a while to realize that even if they hadn't planned it that way deliberately, they still weren't about to change it. Neither are online merchants who've discovered that being an online merchant makes it possible to configure a Customer Service department that never has to service any customers.

David Letterman increasingly looks like he's going to tour in a one-man show as George Bernard Shaw but he isn't…as far as I know. He is however about to debut his new show for Netflix in which he sits around for an hour having a conversation with someone who really interests him. This is in contrast with his old show where he sometimes conducted fifteen-minute interviews with people you got the feeling he couldn't have cared less about.

The show is called My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman and the first one, with our previous president in the guest chair, starts Friday, January 12. It will be monthly thereafter and his guests will include George Clooney, Malala Yousafzai, JAY-Z, Tina Fey, and Howard Stern.

In 2014, around the time CBS announced the date of Dave's last Late Show for them, I wrote here…

Personally, I'd love to see him do a weekly one-on-one interview show. Dave lately seems to average about one guest per week who he seems genuinely glad to have there and is interested in. Have those folks on for the hour and let them just talk: No stunts, no stupid human tricks, just a conversation. Of course, the trouble with this idea is that Letterman is notoriously reticent to be in prime time — and such a low-key show might look chintzy in prime time — and there's real no place to put it in late night. If they put it on Saturday nights at 11:30, it would get slaughtered by SNL.

When I wrote that, he was in talks with CBS about remaining in their "family" so I didn't entertain the notion of him going somewhere like Netflix. I guess he did because CBS had no place to put that kind of show…or maybe Netflix just offered way more cash…or both. In any case, I'll be tuning in.

This has been announced all over the 'net and on the pages where commenting is allowed, one sees much outrage from people who don't like Liberals and loathe the whole notion of an hour where a Liberal host interviews Liberal guests. Okay. I don't like Hannity or Fox and Friends or Tucker Carlson's program but it doesn't upset that they're in my TiVo's Programming Guide.

What's the problem here? I doubt Dave will spend the entirety or even most of any episode bashing Donald Trump or discussing the news, especially since some of these shows are apparently being recorded months before they'll be released for viewing. Trump makes it very easy to write political jokes but they all seem to expire in forty-eight hours when the next insane utterance or revelation hits the front page.

Seems a lot of people are bothered that there is no entertainment show where a beloved entertainer talks, unafraid to reveal right-wing beliefs. In those comment threads, I see the view that the "mainstream media" (i.e., everyone except sometimes Fox News) would never give a show to a Conservative host…and that runs counter to my belief that the folks who run TV networks will put on anything (a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g) that will get ratings. There are programming guys who would dangle their grandmothers naked over a crocodile pit for tune-in and I'm wondering who that Conservative host would be. Kelsey Grammer? Scott Baio? James Woods? I think Dennis Miller has long since had his three strikes and out.

I discussed this a few weeks ago with a comedy-writer friend who's far from me on the political spectrum, though that doesn't stop him from making nastier cracks about Trump than I do. After hearing a flurry from him about Trump's hair, hands, lying, ego and misogyny, I asked him if he would vote for the man again in 2020. His reply? "Absolutely — as long as he's running against Hillary Clinton!"

Challenged by me to name a Conservative who could helm the kind of show Colbert, Kimmel or Meyers does, he came up with Drew Carey but admitted Carey already has maybe the safest high-paying gig in television and probably isn't all that right-wing or interested in pushing any political agenda. We kind of agreed that Liberals ain't good at doing the Limbaugh/Hannity/Carlson act and Conservatives don't excel at the Stewart/Colbert/Meyers kind of thing…so it's kind of a wash.

I don't care if Letterman does or doesn't do a Liberal Talk Show because, first of all, I don't see him as a person who's particularly well-read and knowledgeable in that area. And secondly, what he does best is to be funny…and if he's not going to be that, there's not much point in anyone watching a David Letterman show. I sure won't.

Sorry to hear of the passing yesterday of Jerry Van Dyke.  He was a funny man who deserved to be thought of as a lot more than You-Know-Who's brother.  That's usually a problem when someone gets into the business via a more famous relative.  They get an access and opportunity that they might otherwise have never had but with it comes an expectation.

I once heard Rob Reiner talk at some length about the blessings/curse (it was hard to separate them) of him breaking into the business.  No doubt he got acting auditions he would not have gotten had his name been Rob Schwartz…but with them came expectations that he had the exact same skill set as his father.  He had much to offer but not always to producers who expected him to be Carl 2.0. Jerry was not Dick and the more people came to realize this, the more successful he was.

Jerry was born on July 27, 1931 in Danville, Illinois, which is where he and his brother Dick grew up. (Dick was born December 13, 1925 in West Plains, Missouri…so Dick was a little over five and a half years older.) Jerry began entertaining in nightclubs right out of high school and then in Special Services in the Air Force. He became a local star on TV in Terre Haute, Indiana and went national with two two-part guest appearances playing Dick's younger brother Stacey on The Dick Van Dyke Show. The first two were in March-April of 1962 and the second two aired in January of 1965.

In-between the two, he'd been a regular (briefly) on The Judy Garland Show and he'd hosted a game show (briefly) called Picture This, both for CBS. He reportedly turned down the role of Gilligan on Gilligan's Island and the position of replacing Don Knotts on The Andy Griffith Show. He did accept the leads in two short-run situation comedies — My Mother, The Car (1965) and Accidental Family (1967) and a supporting role on another that lasted one season, Headmaster (1970). It wasn't until 1989 that he landed a regular role on a hit when he played the eternally-confused Luther Van Dam on the nine-season sitcom, Coach.

He was pretty busy before that and after though with guest shots on other shows and in movies, TV commercials, stage plays and tours with his comedy act. I saw him perform live once in Las Vegas at (I think) the old Marina Hotel. He charged onto the stage with his banjo and entertained the hell out of an audience that was still chuckling when they left. I remember thinking his performing style couldn't have been less like his older brother's. He was brash, loud and fast-paced…but it sure got the job done.

The other time I saw him perform was in April of 2011. He and Dick did a short run (five performances) of The Sunshine Boys at a small theater Dick helps support in Malibu. Jerry was pretty damned good as Willie Clark, as I wrote about here.

I did not know Jerry well…mostly as a fellow dining companion when Show Biz Folks convened in some deli. He seemed to jump from cranky to friendly and back again with enormous speed, often in a voice that could have drowned out Joanne Worley screaming. He seemed like the kind of guy who never had an opinion he did not express with 100% confidence but I still liked him on-screen and off.  I tried to tell him that but I'm not sure he heard me.

I have no idea how much of Michael Wolff's book is to be believed but I do know…

1. It's selling like crazy.
2. It's driving Donald Trump off the deep end.
3. When a book sells like crazy, it's followed by many more just like it.  Every best-selling book that insisted Barack Obama was a Kenyan Socialist Mole spawned ten more.

Other authors may not have whatever access Wolff had but it's now established that there's an eager market out there for books that say Trump is full-goose-bozo banana-wackie.  If you're a fan of the guy, brace yourself for the flood.  Even as we speak, book publishers and authors are figuring what they can write that will top Wolff's book — and of course, it's important that it be something so outlandish that Trump himself will denounce the book as garbage, preferably in a string of incoherent tweets.

This has very little to do with the running of our country. It's just how the Free Market works in publishing. If your book can make him feel he has to tell the world he's a "very stable genius," you can probably retire on your royalties.

The book I'm waiting for is the one that will tell us, with sufficient credibility, how these unhinged tweets happen and what (if anything) the more rational folks around Trump have done to try and control them. Does he write them all? Does he run them past no one before he sends them out? It does seem his spelling has gotten a little better.

Years ago, I worked for a TV producer who had his own company and who considered himself a visionary genius…and he was successful because he had indeed come up with some brilliant ideas. Some of them were not so brilliant and many of them were very, very expensive. The network would give him $250,000 to do a show and in the excitement of some concept that came to him in a dream, he'd spend $400,000 to put it on the screen. Needless to say, you will not have a company if you keep doing this.

So he hired a Very Sane Person and said to him, "I'm making you the president of the company. Your job is to stop me from spending money foolishly." And thereafter, the Very Sane Person would occasionally veto some decision made by the owner of the company. He'd just say, "No, we're not going to fill the studio with Guacamole and dress all the dancers in tortilla chips!" — or whatever that week's profound but exorbitant vision was.

The owner of the company would not overrule his employee. He believed he was a genius, maybe of the very stable kind. He certainly told us all often enough that he was a genius. But he was wise enough to believe that his genius had its limitations; that it was somehow lacking in cost-efficiency.

I'm curious if Donald Trump knows or cares how much a majority of Americans thinks he's out of his friggin' mind. He knows this new book claims he is but how much does he care if 55% of the country thinks that? When he was on the campaign trail, he tried real hard to convince us that he was moderate on many issues and might even be to the left of his opponent on some. As Harry Enten notes, those days are gone. Those who thought he had some liberal views got sucker-punched.

I understand him being concerned that his base may start to think he's nuts. Does he care if we, who'd never vote for him in a million years, do? If he does, he needs to have a Pretty Sane Person read those tweets and sometimes say, "You shouldn't send this one." Then again, maybe he has someone doing that and the supposed Very Sane Person is not Very Sane.

Here's an "In Memoriam" reel from NBC News.  June Foray and Rose Marie are both in there…

My shoulder healed itself — without so much as one Ibuprofen — so I am able to type this special edition for you. It deals, of course, with Michael Wolff's new book on the Trump White House…

• Matt Taibbi hopes that that new book is correct in portraying Trump as a buffoon. Taibbi's logic is that if D.J.T. knew how to accomplish anything, he might really be dangerous. I'm not sure I buy this.
• William Saletan tackles the part of Michael Wollf's book that says Trump never wanted to be president and says that explains a lot. I'm pretty sure I don't buy this but I might believe he was unprepared to win.
• Did author Michael Wolff actually have access to the White House — a claim Mr. Trump seems to be denying? Politifact says yes.
• So…how much of this book should we believe? Andrew Prokop offers some guidelines. I'm thinking the rule should be that a book about a famous person doesn't have to be totally accurate. It just has to be more accurate than the famous person.
• And here's one of many online excerpts of the book.

Meanwhile in other news: Mathematicians have discovered a new prime number and it takes 23 million digits to write it out. This will come in so handy.

Donald Trump believed that brilliance and leadership would blossom in his White House and he wanted to make sure someone would be around to record and report it. So unfettered access was given to Michael Wolff, a writer who specializes in gossip and stories of dubious sourcing and he was allowed to observe and interview and gather material which he used in a book called Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which is full of tales of chaos, interoffice hatred, incompetence and maybe even a little treason. The book depicts Trump himself as childish, mean and very interested in tricking friends' wives into having sex with him.

Trump's response has been to insist his lawyers — who presumably told him there was zero chance of this succeeding — use the court system to block publication of the book, even though there are plenty of copies around that would be uploaded to the Internet if they could somehow stop it from being sold at Barnes & Noble. And of course, the fact that he wants to suppress it has given tons of publicity to the book and catapulted it to the top of every Best Seller list. This is in addition to the fact that other reporters are already excerpting and spreading its more salacious and damaging sections…but somehow Trump will prevail. Do I have this right?

I'm taking a minor medical leave from the blog today. I have a tiny pain in my right shoulder which makes typing — and especially mousing — a bit painful. I think I can do a little but a lot will probably inflame it…so I'm going to limit my computer activity to non-blogging work that needs to be done this day. If it got worse and I wanted to write something here, I'd have to compose my posts using only the keys on the left side of the keyboard. That would mean no periods so a post would have to be a very long sentence which I could never end.

I will be back when it gets better on its own or with an assist from Ibuprofen. Maybe later today, maybe tomorrow.

Remembering everyone's favorite singing group…

Sorry I've been too swamped to blog 'til now.  Let's see if I can get through this entire post before the phone rings again…

I've received lots of nice remembrances from people who loved Frank Buxton in person and/or on the screen.  I hope I made it clear what a terrific person I thought he was.  Here's an obit for him that ran in his hometown newspaper.

Also, because of some obits I haven't written, I think I need to post the following periodic reminder: Just because someone dies and I don't write about them, it does not mean that I disliked them or have a negative opinion of them.  It might mean that I just plain have nothing to say about them that others aren't already saying on the 'net.  Contrary to what some folks seem to think, I have not met everyone in Show Business or Comics.  I also don't have interesting insights or anecdotes about some of the people I have met.

As some have noted, I write a lot of obituaries…and if it appears as if a lot of people I know die, that's mainly a function of how many people I know.  My Microsoft Office Address Book has, like, 3600 entries in it.  The larger your Rolodex, the greater the chance each day that someone in it will die.  Most of my friends are alive and I'm going to do everything possible to keep them that way.

This is a tough one for me. Actor-writer-director-producer and all-around great guy Frank Buxton died this morning at 11:45, surrounded by family and friends.

Frank was born February 13, 1930 in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He was a self-described "child of the Golden Age of Radio" and quite the expert on the period. In fact, he authored the definitive book on old radio, Big Broadcast, 1920-1950. It's currently out of print but well worth tracking down if the subject interests you in the slightest. Here's a quick clip from a 1969 episode of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson on which Frank appeared to promote the book. Earlier in the program, they'd done a re-creation of a script from the Superman radio show and you can see Bud Collyer, who played the title role on that series, sitting on the couch…

Frank was all over TV in the fifties and sixties, hosting this and that, including a game show or two. I still can't quite wrap my brain around the fact that I am friends with the guy who presided over the TV show Discovery when I was ten. Discovery, which aired in the late afternoon Monday through Friday on ABC, was one of the few truly entertaining "educational" programs ever done — like another from many years later called Hot Dog. Frank was also responsible for Hot Dog, which won a Peabody Award in 1970. He was also heard as a voice on many cartoon shows, most notably Batfink on which he played…Batfink.

Frank was also an actor on stage and screen. He used to tell me stories about how at the age of 19, he appeared in a production of Three Men on a Horse with Buster Keaton and later spent a year touring Australia playing the Dick Van Dyke role in Bye Bye Birdie. He had a great many other credits but the one you may know best is that he was one of the perpetrators, led by his friend Woody Allen, of the movie, What's Up, Tiger Lily? Here he is a few years later interviewing Woody in the trailer for the film, Bananas…

Frank continued to act in regional theater but his main occupation became writer, director and producer of situation comedies including Love, American Style, The Odd Couple, Happy Days and Mork & Mindy. That's right: He directed Robin Williams, which he described as both a joy and a helluva challenge. When Mr. Williams passed, Frank wrote me a note about that experience.

For years, I assumed that the Frank Buxton who worked on all those sitcoms was a different Frank Buxton from the guy I enjoyed watching on Discovery. It simply didn't occur to me that one man could be so diverse and so talented. I soon learned they were one and the same and that he was one of the nicest, cleverest people I would ever meet. We became good buddies and whenever we were recording Garfield cartoons and Frank was visiting Los Angeles from his home up north in Washington, I would drag him in to join our voice cast. It made the show better and I got to spend more time with Frank.

Frank's close friend John Ellis just wrote to tell me…

He'd been struggling with heart issues for some time but had gotten stronger with a lot of work and support from his wonderful family and community. Things had been pretty damn good until very recently. He even got back on stage with The Edge in November, and a week before his final trip to the hospital, he was singing up a storm at a workshop.

His exit line was perfectly Frank! We sang some songs Christmas Eve and at the end of the last song, he closed his eyes, dropped his hand from his chest, opened his hand and whispered, "Rosebud." We all laughed (including Frank) and we left his room, but as far as we know that was his exit line.

The Edge is an improv troupe on Bainbridge Island in Washington. It was founded by John and Frank in 1993 and was among the many joys of Frank's life and, I'm sure, John's as well. Frank was always doing something — always writing something, always acting in something, always surrounding himself with wonderful, talented people. I want to go like he did…and I think I'll even steal his exit line. He was truly one of my heroes and it was an honor to know him.

The Washington Post fact checkers say that in his 347 days in office, Donald Trump has made 1,950 false or misleading assertions. It is perhaps worth noting that the URL for this article says 1,949 false or misleading statements so one of those numbers is wrong.

If we want to be fair to Trump — and I'm at a loss to explain why anyone would — a lot of items on the list of 1,950 (or 1,949) are repeats or statements which could be interpreted in some way that is technically true. But even if you whittle the list down to half its present length, that's still something like three a day, including all those days where he was playing golf like he said he wouldn't do.

Ah, I can remember when his political opponents called Al Gore a "congenital liar" who was not to believed even if he told you what day of the week it was. They had a list of around ten examples, some of which involving misquoting him a bit. Like, he said "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet" and his detractors got away with changing it to "I invented the Internet" and branding him a liar.

My take on all this is that we really don't care in this country if someone lies to us if they're on our team. "Liar" is a label you only hang on a political opponent and Trump found it very useful to refer to "Lying Hillary" or "Lying Ted" or any member of the press who wrote or said something he didn't like.

The other adjective he does that with is "failing." Any business he doesn't like is failing, regardless of how well they're actually doing…like the New York Times is the "failing New York Times" even though its circulation and revenues are on the rise. I suppose if you called Trump on his use of that descriptor, he'd say he meant that they're failing the American public by printing all those lies. And he'd probably claim credit for any increase in their business, claiming it's because they write so much about him. It must be nice to live in a world where when you win, you win…and when you lose, you insist you won and that's just as good.

The previous item here was a video shot back in the eighties in the offices of DC Comics when they were located at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York. My buddy Shelly Goldstein reminds me that that building has been in the news a lot lately.