Monthly Archives: January 2019

If you read this article by Matt Yglesias, you will know what the emoluments clause of the United States Constitution is. This will put you one up on the man seeking to be our next Attorney General.

Yesterday's video link was another great parody by Randy Rainbow and it brought a message from someone (a young someone, I assume) asking me what the song was upon which Mr. Rainbow based his effort. It's "Nothing Like a Dame" from the Broadway musical, South Pacific.

Here's the scene from the 1958 movie and yes, that's Ray Walston as Luther. In the number, you may also notice a brawny sailor with "Stew Pot" on his shirt. That's Ken Clark, who had a pretty good career appearing in "sword and sandal" movies, including a number of them with "Hercules" in the title.

You may also notice in this clip that his speaking voice in no way matches his singing voice. That's because his singing voice was supplied by the ubiquitous Thurl Ravenscroft, who was heard on dozens (if not hundreds) of records and also in movies, commercials and cartoons. He is best remembered for playing the voice of Tony the Tiger in the Sugar Frosted Flakes commercials, for singing "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" in the original Chuck Jones animation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and I think he's still heard in several attractions at Disneyland. You'll hear that distinctive basso profundo throughout much of this clip…

Galen Fott just sent me this…

I enjoyed your obit on Carol Channing. In the summer of 1984, I saw Channing in Houston in Jerry's Girls, a revue of Jerry Herman's music. (Her costars were Leslie Uggams and Andrea McArdle.) So I'm guessing that's the event Channing was plugging on the same TV show you were on.

…and I'll bet Galen Fott is right. In fact, I'm pretty sure of it. Thanks, Galen!

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has called for a dramatic increase in taxes paid by really, really wealthy people. Republican leaders in government and the punditry have reacted like she's proposing that we dismantle the United States of America and turn the whole thing into a chain of Chipotle restaurants. But at least according to one poll, that idea fares well with Democratic voters and Independents, and doesn't even do so bad with Republicans.

If you want to know what's really going down with illegals crossing our southern border — and clearly, some people don't want to know because accurate information fouls up their goals — Kevin Drum has some real data, most of it even in EZ chart form. (Caution: Contains facts.)

I was in the same room with Carol Channing three times. One was when she was doing a "farewell tour" (and maybe not the last one) of her legendary role in Hello, Dolly! Keep in mind when I say that that I have a new policy of using the word "legend" sparingly because I think it's been devalued almost to the point of worthlessness by being applied to everything and everyone these days. It just happens to be the only applicable term in this case. And while I have never been all that fond of the show itself, what she did in it was legendary — in the real sense of that word.

Second Time: I was in Houston (or maybe Dallas but I think it was Houston) as a guest at a comic book convention there. This was in the mid-eighties, I believe. The convention operators arranged to have one of their guests go to a local TV station one morning to appear on Good Morning, Houston — or whatever the name of the show and the city were — and plug the con. Every guest more important than me (i.e., all of them) begged off and I let myself get talked into being the one.

It meant getting up way early, making myself as presentable as possible at that hour, being driven to the TV station and waiting an awfully long time to get on the air. I was mad at myself for agreeing until I found out that one of the other guests on the program that morn was Ms. Carol Channing. She was in town in some sort of concert-type show and she was appearing on the TV program for promotional reasons. I found that among the many, many things Carol Channing did better than me was to be awake, alert and very scintillating at 7:30 AM.

We had a wonderful half-hour in the green room waiting to go on. I told her I'd seen her in the above-referenced tour when it played Los Angeles. She was delighted but said, "You know, eventually you'll be telling people that you saw me on Broadway in the original production. Everyone who attended those touring shows eventually does. I think that's why they went to them…so they could tell people "I saw Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly! and either they say it was in New York or they don't mention it was in Schenectady!"

Great lady. Great talker. I was so delighted to spend that time with her and find out for myself that she was just like that for real. I didn't want to spoil the moment by asking her about being in the movie, Skidoo!

I was the last guest that morning on AM Houston or Good Morning, Dallas or whatever the hell it was. They gave me about 45 seconds to plug the con because Carol had been such a great guest, they'd gone way over talking to her. If I'd been the producer, I'd have dumped the clown from the comic book convention and all the other guests and just let her fill the whole danged show.

Third time I was in the same room as Carol Channing: In early 2009, the Magic Castle in Hollywood experimented with hosting cabaret shows in one of its performing spaces. The Board later decided to just stick with magic and they stopped the experiment but before they did, they had some wonderful shows there. Stan Freberg did a couple of nights there as did many singers of show tunes…including Carol. I went with my friend Shelly Goldstein, who herself sold out that showroom for a few evenings.

Carol was dynamic and funny and charming and very energetic. Of course, she was a much younger woman then. She was 88. She did an awful lot of magic of her own kind without pulling a rabbit out of a hat, sawing anyone in half or hauling out the linking rings. She just sat and talked and sang.

It was one of the best evenings I ever spent listening to someone just be legendary. See? There's that word again.

• White House says Trump "is personally paying for" event with National Champions Clemson tonight "to be catered with some of everyone's favorite fast foods." Yes, because what's a celebration without 5-hour old Big Macs, Whoppers and fries?

It's Randy Rainbow Time! It's Randy Rainbow Time! It's Randy Rainbow Time! It's Randy Rainbow Time! It's Randy Rainbow Time!

Here's the other question I received from Richard Pontius…

My other question relates to cartoons. How are decisions regarding a series cancellation made these days? Do ratings play less of a role? I've been quite impressed and enjoyed many modern-day shows like Batman: TAS and Batman: Brave and Bold, Superman: TAS, Avengers: Earth Mightiest Heroes, etc. but all get pulled from production before they seem to have run their course. In the case of The Avengers, I assume it was because Marvel/Disney wanted to retool the show to align with the movies. In other cases, I'm guessing somewhat arbitrary decisions from above, unless people like Paul Dini just get burned out after a while.

Well, Paul never gets burned out but I hope someday he does. As fine a writer as he is, he's an even better cook. I'd like him to give up writing — he can leave all those assignments to me — and open a restaurant, preferably one near my house. But that's not what you wrote to ask about. Sorry.

The decision to cancel a cartoon show these days always has at least something to do with ratings but generally more with how the show fits in with the over-all plans for merchandising and marketing the characters or property. Naturally, when a company or some division undergoes a major change in management personnel, that usually triggers a change in plans or priorities…and sometimes, what's currently being produced doesn't fit in with the plans of the new bosses.

Not long ago, I got a call inquiring about my availability to serve in some capacity on a new cartoon show based on an old, largely-dormant property that a company was planning to resuscitate. They were planning (and may still be, for all I know), this big promotional putsch to drive the characters back into public awareness with new toys and t-shirts and other merchandise and the advertising thereof. They had, they seemed certain, the funding to produce some double-digit number of episodes of a cartoon show that would display the "new look" for the characters.

For reasons they didn't tell me, the whole resurrection has been stalled-out so the cartoon show is on hold, perhaps forever. If it were to get on the air, the length of time it would be on would have a lot to do with whether it was aiding the overall fame and popularity of the characters and how many action figures of them were being sold.

Keeping a show in production can also have a lot to do with how many episodes have been produced…and this is where the ratings may really be important. If a show is still pulling down strong numbers on its sixth reruns, that can be an argument that new episodes aren't needed; that the company is better off investing that dough in the production of a new series rather than in more of a series that they think will continue to attract decent numbers without the expense of new episodes.

A friend of mine who signed on to work on a series once said, "I hope it does well in the ratings…but not too well."

If a show has made, say, 36 episodes, someone might say, "Hey, if we can get this up to 65, that will make this a much stronger package for reruns and overseas sales." Or if they've done 65 (or some other particular number), they might figure that exceeding that number will not be cost-effective in terms of raising the value of the rerun package. That was part of the reason we stopped making Garfield and Friends after 121 half-hours.

Also, some shows also get more episodes because they want to introduce new elements into the show (characters, props, etc.) that will be a part of the future merchandising. This is especially the case with shows that are financed, in whole or part by toy companies. They have new toys coming out that tie in with the franchise. They want the new toys to appear in the cartoon. That's why there were so many episodes made of properties like G.I. Joe and Transformers.

What may make the decisions seem arbitrary is that this is not an exact science and sometimes, one executive's rationale for ordering more episodes of a show is the same as another exec's reason for stopping a series. In the old days when TV networks bought shows for Saturday morning, all they really cared about were the ratings because the networks rarely shared in other sources of revenue like merchandising or overseas sales. Nowadays, most cartoon shows are funded by companies that do benefit from the merchandising and foreign sales so that has to figure into the decision-making.

Basically, that's your answer: It's not an exact science. These days, as far as some people are concerned, neither is science.

The FX Network has a new limited series (eight episodes) in the works called Fosse/Verdon. It stars Sam Rockwell as superstar director Bob Fosse, Michelle Williams as Gwen Verdon and other people as known performers and personalities. I haven't seen a bit of it other than what's below but I can tell you that, unlike Stan & Ollie, there will be no need to make up anything to have conflict in the story. The trailer looks like someone's done a good job of replicating Fosse's unique styles of dancing and cinematography so I'm curious to see what else they'll do right. Episode 1 is expected in April..

Richard Pontius sent two questions and I'm going to answer one here today and one here tomorrow. Here's today's…

Back in the days before residuals, how did television character actors support themselves between jobs? Not the Charles Lanes, Burt Mustins or Vito Scottis who seemed to appear in every single network series every single season from the 50s to early 70s, but the folks without a recurring role who we might recognize but who weren't in as high demand.

In television, there weren't many days "before residuals" for actors because they started in 1952 and most of the shows before that were live and not rerun.

Residuals weren't a lot at first…then they were raised but they were finite. After a certain number of reruns, the performers got bupkis. That changed during the 1973-1974 season and if you were on a show after that, you get residuals in perpetuity. (Don Knotts made a lot more money off the residuals from his five years on Three's Company than he made for his five years on The Andy Griffith Show even though the latter has rerun many, many more times. He, like most, was quite sore about not being paid for the rerunning of his earlier work.)

Anyway, the answer to your question is that acting is not a lucrative profession for most of its practitioners. Never has been, never will be. Residuals from TV appearances help but regardless, a large percentage of actors always need some sort of supplemental income. I know a lady who did a fair amount of television in the sixties but was never a regular on a series. She acted under her stage name while selling real estate under her real name…and when she met clients as a realtor, she would put on a wig, do different make-up, change her voice a bit and hope few people said, "Hey, didn't I see you last night on Mannix?"

In the seventies, her agent left the business and since she wasn't working a lot then, she couldn't get another. So what she did was to invent her own agent. She put in an extra phone line in her home. Then she made up the name of a mythical manager and listed it with SAG and AFTRA. If you called one of those unions wanting to hire her, you got that name and number. And if you called that number, you got her using a fake voice and she'd arrange an audition or booking for her client.

Also, there are a lot of acting jobs you never hear about. I'm thinking now of an actor friend who managed to get four or five days of scale work per year on TV shows and from the infrequency of seeing him, you might wonder how he was able to pay his rent. He was lucky: He got picked to do a series of regional commercials that were filmed in Hollywood but never run on this coast. He made way more from those than he did from guesting on national TV programs. There are also voiceover jobs, industrial films, stage work, stand-in jobs and other sources of income. Some try teaching their craft.

But acting has never been the steadiest of occupations and I guess the answer to your question is that some of them didn't support themselves between jobs…or had to live very frugal lives. It will probably always be like that.

• Press reports say there's no detailed record, even in classified files, of Trump's face-to-face interactions with Putin over the past two years. Maybe there is and it's in a file somewhere with Hillary's e-mails.

What an awful, awful piece of news today: Batton Lash — cartoonist, writer, friend and usually the best-dressed guy at Comic-Con — died this morning at the age of 65.  He'd been battling brain cancer for a couple of years.

Bat was a charming, gracious man who was disliked by absolutely no one and our hearts ache for his beloved wife of a quarter-century, Jackie Estrada. Together, they produced and promoted some wonderful comics and creations, most notably Wolff & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre and Supernatural Law. You never saw a more perfectly matched couple.

We knew he was sick but he was also one of those people you couldn't imagine not having in your world. It had a lot to do with a love of comics that extended to all the people around him in the comic book community, along with a laugh that made you want to hang around the guy, just to hear it. If anything could make that big hall at Comic-Con seem empty, it's this.

In the last hour or so, six different people have sent me what is essentially the same message. Here's the version I got from Mike Martin…

You wrote, "That's what politics in this country has become. The next time a Supreme Court seat has to be filled, most Democrats want the person who will most reliably vote as per the Democratic line and most Republicans want the person who is guaranteed to always vote with the G.O.P." I have to disagree with this statement as it falls into the "both sides" trap.

If you look at the last pick for the Supreme Court that Obama made, that was ignored by the Republican Senate, Merrick Garland was by all accounts the kind of centrist that you call for and most Democrats (myself included) would have been very happy to have such a centrist on the Supreme Court. We don't want a left wing dictatorship. We just want a fair shake.

I'm going to stand by what I said. I think most Democrats (myself included) would like folks like Garland on the Supreme Court if — and it's a big "if" — the Republicans weren't so determined to put men like Bret Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas on the court. This is one of those "if they'll stop it, we'll stop it" confrontations.

It used to be that we didn't want ideologues. Heck, it used to be so non-confrontational that the Senate confirmed Supreme Court nominees by voice votes. It's quite arguable how and when that changed but it did change and now we have Justices who just squeak by and every vote is fought-over. Kavanaugh got in, 50-48.

I submit to you that Obama nominated Merrick Garland because facing the kind of Senate that would have to confirm his nominee, the President decided that Garland had a slim chance, whereas anyone more Liberal would have had no chance whatsoever. Also, to reject Garland would mean that a lot of Republican Senators who in the past had supported him and said he was a good man would have had to reverse themselves. There might still have been a Republican or two who would be embarrassed to do that.

If Obama had had a Democratic senate, he'd have nominated someone more Liberal, if only to balance against the next right-wing nominee we'd get whenever Republicans seized the White House. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. And I think the one way to stop this kind of game would be to change the rules so every nominee had to be satisfactory enough to the minority party that he or she could be confirmed by two-thirds. Which will never happen.

Not that anything I post here will ever change the world but I've been trying to think of what the endgame might be for the government shutdown.

Ezra Klein says Trump doesn't care about The Wall. If he really did, sez Klein, he would get it the way most politicians get something they want: They dicker and offer the other side something in return…

Trump doesn't care about the wall. He cares about being seen fighting for the wall. From that perspective — Trump's perspective — Tuesday night's speech was a success. His base saw him fighting for them. And that may have been all he really wanted.

Trump cares about being seen as a winner, which he seems to believe is in tension with compromising. His sense of negotiations is fundamentally zero-sum: One side has to lose and one side has to win. If Trump gives Democrats anything they can present as a win, he will look like a loser. As such, he can't give them the concessions that might get him the wall because what he'd be giving up — his image as a winner — is more important to him than the policy he'd be gaining.

I would amend Mr. Klein's theory a tiny bit. I think Trump desperately wants The Wall because if he gets it on his terms, he looks like a big winner who gets everything he wants or promises. He just doesn't want The Wall on anyone else's terms.

Klein's line about Trump's concept of negotiations — "One side has to lose and one side has to win" — struck a note with me. I've run into too many people on the business side of show business who play that way. The object of a negotiation is not to arrive at a deal that works for both parties. The objective is the deal that makes them happy and you unhappy. In a way, it's more about power than money and about making (or keeping) you subservient and afraid of them.

That's what politics in this country has become. The next time a Supreme Court seat has to be filled, most Democrats want the person who will most reliably vote as per the Democratic line and most Republicans want the person who is guaranteed to always vote with the G.O.P. Somewhere out there, there are folks who have the proper experience in Law to sit on the Highest Court and also have open minds. They'd look at each question in a non-partisan manner and be a true Swing Vote. Almost no one wants that person even though we all know that's what a Supreme Court Justice is supposed to be.

The other day, I got into a little verbal scuffle with an acquaintance who is pro-Wall. Ostensibly, he's for stopping illegal immigration and drug importation but he's not open to expanding E-Verify or increased scanning for drugs at airports, which is where most of them come in. That's because Trump is not at the moment demanding those and this is not to most people, a debate over whether The Wall is the best way to deal with the problem. We're not even really debating whether there is a problem.

This is really just a battle over whether Trump can get whatever he wants and the Democrats can't stop him. In a saner context, it would be settled with a compromise and maybe, ultimately, it will. But compromises can result in a win-win situation and Trump doesn't want that. He wants a win-lose with himself in the first position. I hope there are Traffic Controllers when I fly to Santa Cruz at the end of this month.