Monthly Archives: February 2018

I usually watch every new game show at least once but The Wall was on for close to a year before I even knew it existed. Why? Because it's on NBC and I watch almost nothing on NBC on my TV set. What I do watch on that network — highlights of Seth Meyers' show and occasionally Jimmy Fallon's — I watch on YouTube. So I never saw a commercial for The Wall and I missed any mentions of it on the 'net.

If you haven't seen it, it works like this: They bring on two contestants who have some sort of bond between them — they're best buddies or they're related — and who are extraordinary people who have done good things for the world and/or each other. The show spends a lot of time telling you how extraordinary they are and what good people they are and how much they love each other. And when the show isn't telling us how much they love each other, the contestants are telling us how much they love each other.

Sometimes, it has a very rehearsed feel and sometimes it sounds spontaneous. I suspect it's all sincere but that the players have been seriously coached to present all that sincerity in a way that will work better on television. Some of them — well aware they've been given the opportunity to maybe go home as millionaires — are probably trying way too hard to give the producers what they want.

The game itself involves a giant Plinko board and dropping red balls and green balls into its slots. When a green ball goes into a slot, the players win the amount of money associated with that slot. When a red ball goes in, the players lose that amount. Since the amounts escalate throughout the show and near the end, one slot is worth a million dollars, it is literally possible to win a million one minute and lose it the next.

Most players at one point rack up a total of well into seven figures but most do not keep all of it.  A few keep none of it.  So it's often an hour of wild mood swings.

Most of the ball-dropping is done by one contestant while his or her loved one is off in isolation, racking up bucks by answering questions. Then that person in isolation is given a contract which says that their team will accept the prize money they've accumulated answering questions plus what they won in the first ball dropping. They can do that and take home that amount or they can tear it up and accept the unknown-to-them amount that their partner has won on The Wall. So it's kind of a question of "How much do you trust your partner's luck?" Most of the time, they seem to tear up the contract.

In each show's finale, the player who was in isolation is brought out to go face-to-face with their partner and tell them whether or not they tore up the contract. But first, they make a little speech to their partner about how they love them and trust them and their lives would be worthless without them. Then they fake out their partners and this is where things sound almost scripted to me. If they tore up the contract, they have to start speaking about why they decided to sign it…so for a moment, everyone thinks they did. But then they make a switch and reveal that they tore it up after all and they're really, really unsure if that was the right thing to do.

Or it sometimes works the other way: They start telling their partner about how they love them and trust them and their lives would be worthless without them and then they start speaking about why they tore it up and then they do the switcheroo and reveal that they signed it instead. Then their partner makes a speech about how they love them and trust them and their lives would be worthless without them before revealing how they did on The Wall.

On one recent episode, there was a father/daughter team. The father, sent off to isolation, had to choose between accepting "the guarantee" — which he thought might be around $35,000 but was actually around $95,000 — or tearing up the contract and accepting what his daughter had won on The Wall. He had no way of knowing if that amount was more or less than the guarantee. For all he knew, it could have been zero.

Before I go any further, here's the clip of the finale…

It's kind of a strange situation where, if they'd left with $35,000 or even $95,000, he and his daughter would have been regarded as losers. I can remember the day when winning ten grand on The $10,000 Pyramid seemed like all the money in the world…and it's not just inflation that has changed the definition of Big Bucks on game shows. The Price is Right, Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! all now occasionally dispense prizes that make the prizes dispensed on earlier versions of those shows look like a case of Turtle Wax and a copy of the home game.  They have to to keep up with the trend.

Anyway, as you just saw if the video embed is still there and you clicked on it, the father made his speech about how much he loved her, no matter what the outcome, then he made his speech that made it sound like he'd signed the contract and accepted the 95 thou on their behalf…then he finally said, "I tore it up."

They cut to the other daughter in the audience — the who hadn't come onstage and dropped balls — and that daughter reacted a bit (quietly) because she now knew they'd won the $1.4 million. The daughter onstage knew too but she had to remain expressionless. I can't think of any other game show in history where if you won mega-money, you had to not show emotion for a minute or two.  She had to deliver her little "I love you, no matter what" speech first.  It actually makes that winning moment more meaningful.

If you think Big Money game shows are stupid or contrived or you resent the emotional roller coaster they put you and the players through, it could be agony.  I'm fine with that if it seems genuine and there's enough on The Wall that seems genuine that I'm watching it.  I occasionally fast-forward through some of the padding but I am watching it.  It works for me in a way that most of these shows don't and one big reason I haven't mentioned yet is its host, Chris Hardwick.

He's real good.  Real, real good.  I liked him on @Midnight and I like him here because he's a person hosting a game show instead of playing the role of Game Show Host.

Unlike most in that job description, he doesn't seem to be reciting lines that were drilled into him and doesn't seem to believe that the show is about him.  He's either a darn good actor or he really cares about the contestants and he has a way of saying just the right thing when, as often happens on this program, things don't turn out the way anyone would have liked.  He's also sometimes pretty funny but he knows when not to be.

Years ago when I was working with Dick Clark, I was brought into a meeting about a game show proposal.  The proposal never went very far but at one point, they were discussing potential hosts and Dick, who was a terrific game show host himself, vetoed one suggestion.  I'll change the name of the suggested host to Johnny Giveaway and what Dick said was, "You don't want him.  Instead of servicing the game, he'll spend every minute in front of the camera trying to turn it into The Johnny Giveaway Show."

The host of The Wall is wise enough not to do this…which is one reason I suspect we'll soon see The Chris Hardwick Show.   Until then, I'm going to watch The Wall, occasionally throttling through with the FF button.

Hey, you know the song "Coffee Break" from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying? Well, in case you've been wondering how it played in the Japanese production…

• I don't know about schools now but in my day, I never had a teacher I would have trusted to be able to use a gun. If we arm them, all we're doing is telling the crazies, "When you start shooting up a classroom, start with the teachers."

• Trump doesn't want to arm teachers because it's a good idea. It's actually a dreadful idea. He wants to do it because it's the only thing that might pass for "doing something" that will please the NRA.

Here's a piece that ran on The History Channel a few years ago about the origins of MAD magazine. It's interesting because despite on-camera interviews with two people who knew better, it manages to get the history all wrong and it makes no mention of MAD's founding editor-writer, Harvey Kurtzman. Publisher William M. Gaines, who deserves some of the credit gets all of it.

It makes it sound like ol' Doc Wertham single-handedly created the anti-comic book hysteria of the fifties (he had a lot of help) and it repeats the errant notion that MAD went from being a color comic book to a black-and-white magazine to escape comic book censorship. Here's what really happened…

Harvey Kurtzman wrote and edited the comic book issues. He probably should also be acknowledged as the creator of the publication since the most Gaines used to claim was that he suggested that Kurtzman whip up a humor comic…and sometimes, Gaines would kind of vaguely say he came up with the title. No one has ever suggested that the contents, format and underlying philosophy didn't come from Kurtzman.

Harvey loved doing comic books but he hated the cheapness and the low status of the form. Mingling as he did with people involved in what he saw as "real publishing," he was embarrassed to admit what he did for a living. And if people said that the crime and horror comics Gaines published were disgraceful, Kurtzman was inclined to agree. Comics paid badly, they were printed badly, they were targeted at children. That was how he felt and he suggested to Gaines that MAD, which was enjoying great sales as a comic book, be turned into a magazine. It would be a way for Harvey to do comics without being in the low-prestige comic book industry.

Gaines said no at first. Gaines was anti-expansion and preferred to keep his business small and simple. But then Kurtzman got an offer to go to work at Pageant magazine — then, a successful and more prestigious publication — and he told Gaines he was taking it.

Bill Gaines was then-convinced that Kurtzman (the guy not mentioned in this documentary about the beginnings of MAD) was irreplaceable and he countered with an offer to make Harvey's idea a reality and turn MAD into a slick magazine. Kurtzman stayed on — until he later got a better offer from Hugh Hefner — and presided over MAD's conversion. The move was not done to escape censorship, which was not then a serious threat. Not long after though, the change became a happy side effect. When such banning did happen, MAD was safe.

This history has never been a secret. If the History Channel was owned by Time-Warner, which has occasionally preferred to forget Kurtzman, I could understand his omission here…but the network is a joint venture of Hearst and Disney. So I don't know why this is so wrong…

• I've decided that from now on, anyone who says anything I don't want to deal with is a paid actor who I can therefore ignore and anything that happens that I can't cope with is a False Flag hoax. So much easier than living in the real world.

I have a Season Pass on my TiVo for The Opposition With Jordan Klepper — a show I enjoy very much. But said TiVo didn't record it last evening and I just figured out why. For some reason, the program guide has some listings as The Opposition W/ Jordan Klepper and my TiVo thinks that's a different show…one it's not programmed to record.

I took a Season Pass on the abbreviated name and it'll pick up last night's episode on the next replay but only because I caught it in time. I wish they wouldn't do things like that.

Are you reading Written By, the magazine published by the Writers Guild of America? You should. It's a real good magazine and any aspiring writer who isn't reading every issue is missing a valuable resource. So is anyone who just wants to know more about the making of television shows and movies.

As a member, I get every issue in the mail but if I didn't, I'd pay. I think it's available on some newsstands and non-members can subscribe. Better still (and cheaper), you can read it or download it as a PDF over on this page.

The current issue is the February/March one with Greta Gerwig on the cover. There's a nice tribute to our friend Len Wein in it and I also enjoyed an article by Richard Stayton, who investigated the claim that William Goldman did not write 90% of the movie, All the President's Men. SPOILER ALERT: He says it isn't so. And there's plenty of other material in there you'll enjoy.

My favorite local deli — Canter's, over on Fairfax — has announced they're discontinuing table service between the hours of 3 AM and 8 AM except on Friday and Saturday nights. The deli, which has been one of L.A.'s great "we never close" hangouts, will still be open 24 hours but only the deli counter and bakery counter will be selling food during the late weeknight hours.

What is it with classic delicatessens closing down? In a short space of time, New York lost both the Carnegie Deli and the Stage Deli, which were one block from each other on one of the most heavily-trafficked streets in the world. Now we have Canter's here cutting back along with the aforementioned rumors about the Nate 'n Al Deli deli going away.

Some of the closures seem to be matters of real estate deals. I'm told the 24-hour Du-Par's non-deli restaurant in Studio City (which we wrote about here) closed because even if they'd doubled their prices and their business, they could not have afforded what another business was willing to pay to lease their space. Rumor has it that if Nate 'n Al's vanishes, it will because of a mega-deal to redevelop much of that block. It's profitable, a friend told me, but not so profitable it can be allowed to stand in the way of what some developer wants to do on that street.

So that explains some of it. I'm wondering how much it matters that some people want to eat healthier than they think they can in a place that specializes in pastrami sandwiches so thick you can't wrap your mouth around one. Then again, pizza places keep trying to up the cheese and bacon content of their products so I'm not sure what's going on here. It's hard to believe any kind of business in today's America would flounder because too many people are counting calories.

Here's a funny stand-up spot that Jena Friedman did recently on Conan O'Brien's show. Thanks to Bruce Reznick for letting me know about this…

The Nate 'n Al Delicatessen in Beverly Hills is about to be sold…maybe. And maybe it will close, maybe it will move or maybe it will stay right where it is and continue serving the same fine grub. It could even go Vegan and start making its pastrami out of tofu for all we know.

What we do know from this report over at Eater L.A. is that someone says one of the owners says they're in talks to sell. That's enough to put a lot of longtime locals into a bit of a panic.

The deli everyone refers to as just "Nate 'n Al's" is a fine place with many great memories for some of us. My parents loved eating there and whenever we went in, there was a long wait but your table, when you got it, usually had a great view of Milton Berle or Jack Benny or Jan Murray or Doris Day. For a decade or so, I never went there for a breakfast meeting without sitting near Doris Day. The waitresses were also stars. Some of them had been there so long, it made you wonder if deli food didn't promote longevity.

It's no longer as hard to get a table and the current show biz community hasn't embraced the place the way an earlier generation did. But it's still a great deli and I hope it remains what it is…and also where it is unless, of course, new owners want to move it to within walking distance of my home.

Years ago here, I put up a section called Incessantly Asked Questions in which I attempted to answer, once and for all, questions about comics and animation that I found myself answering over and over on the web. It worked pretty well for its purpose, which was to spare me answering the same question twenty times. Instead, I could just link questioners to the appropriate page. But somehow, I never got around to adding to the IAQ section as I'd planned.

Well, I just added a new (and very long) answer to a question I keep being asked on Facebook. It's about the unused cover that Jack Kirby drew for Thor #144 in 1967. People who see it seem to think that Jack sat down one day and made up a cover drawing, took it in to Stan Lee and Stan said, "No, that's lousy" and he rejected it so Jack wasn't paid. There's also a rumor that the inker refused to ink it because it was so complicated…and since they couldn't get it inked, they couldn't use it. Or something like that.

If you wanna know what really happened, here's the link to a new IAQ page. And if you come across someone else who wonders about that cover, please do us all a favor and link them to that page. I'll be adding a few more to the IAQ section in the future.

Last week was not a good week for Donald Trump. Given how many shoes seem to be droppable in his many and varied scandals, I suspect we'll be saying that for most weeks to come. Here's some stuff…

• Nate Silver attempts to answer the unanswerable question as to how much Russian meddling had to do with Trump winning the presidency. He doesn't really know and I doubt anyone ever will.
• A year ago, correspondents for Slate made a lot of predictions about Trump's first year and now it's time to score how they did. Not bad, guys…
• Obama's chief economist Jason Furman thinks Trump's forecasts for the American economy are absurd. One wonders if anyone's chief economist (including Trump's) really believes them.
• Trump's National Security Adviser Says Proof of Russian Election Meddling Is "Incontrovertible." Trump apparently says that's Fake News and we shouldn't listen to his National Security Adviser. Is it? If so, why is this person his National Security Adviser?
• Since it's Presidents Day, the New York Times asked scholars to rank our presidents, best to worst. Trump did not do well even among Republican scholars. I always regard any of these rankings as click bait and not much more but if you're baited to click, here's the link.
• Thomas Friedman dives into the theory that Trump is either being blackmailed by Russia, could be blackmailed by Russia or is really, really foolish with regard to Russia. I'm not sure which one I'd fear most.
• Must Trump testify in Robert Mueller's investigations? Joe Conason thinks he does and Conason's probably right. Which doesn't mean he will.

John Oliver had a strong season-opener last night, focusing on the hard-to-argue premise that Trump is becoming the most mocked and ridiculed person on this planet. If you didn't see it, the show reruns many times this week. I suspect once a week at Comedy Central, they have a little ritual where everyone responsible for letting Oliver get away gathers in a room and they just kick each other for forty-five minutes.

In 1959, Groucho Marx published an autobiography called Groucho and Me.  It was a pretty funny book and if you never read it, I'd suggest getting a copy and rectifying that oversight.  If you do, you'll notice a frequent usage of the name "Delaney."  Every time Groucho doesn't recall someone's name or wants to change it for legal-type reasons, that person becomes Delaney.  Here, scanned right out of a copy, is one such example…

I probably read this book around 1964 or 1965 when my love of the Marx Brothers was just starting to kick in.  Among the many things I picked up from Groucho was the use of the name.  As I began writing stories — published or otherwise — I often named a character Delaney or made reference to Delaney's Market or Delaney Avenue. It was as good a name as any.

When my friend Rob Solomon asked me to help him name his fanzine and to art-direct covers for it, I suggested it be called Delaney. The cover below at left is from one issue. Another friend, Dan Gheno, penciled this cover and I did the inking and all the lettering, including the Delaney title logo.

In a lot of the comic books I've written since I started in 1970, I've had characters named Delaney. One example of many was in a limited series I did back in 1993 with Sergio Aragonés called The Mighty Magnor. One of the heroes, as you'll see above right, was named C.J. Delaney.

A number of folks have noticed my repeated use of the name Delaney, which is fine with me. Better they notice that than my tendency to reuse the same jokes over and over. One or two of them have even noticed the most widely-seen usage of the name in something I worked on. Back on the seventies' TV series, Welcome Back, Kotter, reference was occasionally made to — and an actor once played on-camera — Mr. Kotter's old high school pal, Dino "Crazy" Delaney. Since I was a story editor on that show for a while, you'd probably assume that name came from me —

— and if you assumed that, you'd be incorrect. I agree that it seems logical but not everything that seems logical is so. I had nothing to do with the naming of Dino "Crazy" Delaney. In fact, he was mentioned on the show before I ever saw it, let alone worked on it. Just one of those coincidences.

Still, two or three times in my life, someone has made that deduction to me and I have to tell them they're wrong. A few months ago, a fellow who says he's doing a book on Welcome Back, Kotter wrote me not to ask me any questions whatsoever about working on the show but to verify that I, as he'd brilliantly deduced, must have named Dino "Crazy" Delaney. When I told him I hadn't, we got into a very silly e-mail argument with him telling me I had to be wrong because I had this pattern of naming characters Delaney so it was, as he put it, "absolutely, totally obvious" that I had named the character. I'm not sure if I convinced him I didn't. We'll find out if/when this book comes out.

But where did the Delaney come from? Well, one of the producers when I worked on Kotter was a clever guy named George Yanok. Many years after that show, I was browsing through my buddy Lee Goldberg's book, Unsold TV Pilots, and I noticed that a year or two before, George had co-written a TV-Movie/pilot called Delaney…

It starred Ed Lauter as Bud Delaney, a private eye in the Dashiell Hammett/Raymond Chandler tradition. So did George name Dino "Crazy" Delaney? Well, isn't it "absolutely, totally obvious?"

Here's a story I don't think I've told before here. Some years ago, I was at a party full of Hollywood-type people and I was introduced to Betty White. Told that I was the producer of The Garfield Show, she instantly said to me, "Why haven't I been on The Garfield Show?" I smiled and said, "Because you're on everything else!" I don't think any TV actor at whatever age she was then has ever been in more demand than Betty White was at the time.

We wound up talking about other things and parting. Then a little later, she came up to me and said, "I hope you know I was only half-serious when I asked you, 'Why haven't I been on The Garfield Show.'" I said, "I assumed as much but just out of curiosity…what about the other half? You're on like twenty-seven TV shows these days. We pay scale to all our guest stars. If I did want to hire you, are you even available? And are you available for that money?"

She thought for a second and said, "No, I guess I'm not. The money wouldn't matter all that much but I just don't really have the time." Then she asked me, "Do you have any experience with feral cats?"

I told her about the small herd of them I feed in my backyard. She said, "Well, then maybe you're aware of this. Looking for food is hardwired into most feral cats. Their lives revolve around finding the next meal so even if you feed one and she stuffs herself, a minute later, she's thinking, 'Where is food? Where do I find food?' They can't help themselves. I'm afraid most actors are like that. Even when they have a job, they're thinking, 'Where is my next one?'"

"When we were doing The Golden Girls, there was a point where we were picked-up for two more seasons and I had all these other things I was doing. I was turning down offer after offer because I just didn't have the time open. And still, there were moments when a little voice in me was wondering, 'What are you going to do when this ends?' Actors…at times, we're all like feral cats!"

I understand that. There are times I used to wish the writing business ever worked like some professions where you could know with some certainty what you'd be doing for the next five or ten years. I turned down staff jobs at Disney and Hanna-Barbera that at the time looked like jobs I could have stayed in until I hit retirement age. Well now, I'm approaching retirement age — without the slightest thought of retiring — and I realize I wouldn't have been at either company 'til now. Hanna-Barbera isn't even there anymore and Disney has reshuffled so much that I don't think anyone who I thought had a "job for life" there in 1980 lasted in it into this century.

How it is in other fields, I haven't a clue…but in entertainment and publishing, we all seem to be wand'ring nomads, camping here or there for a time and then looking for something else. About 98% of the time I like it that way, especially since I learned to not think like a feral cat. Which reminds me I have to go feed a couple…