Monthly Archives: June 2020

• I just checked. I live 1,433 miles from Trump's rally in Tulsa. I'm worried that might not be far enough away.

It's been 100 days since my wise physician "suggested" I stay at home and be super-cautious about going out or letting people in. Those hundred days haven't been all that bad, in large part because I'm a work-at-home kinda guy who doesn't mind functioning in a kind of "controlled alone." I wish it wasn't like this but I long ago grasped the concept — which some folks I know or see on TV could stand to learn — of making the best of a bad situation you are powerless to fix. I spent a good twenty minutes trying to invent a vaccine for the coronavirus, failed and decided to just hunker down and bunker down.

I go out occasionally. Yesterday, properly masked, I went to my podiatrist as part of my campaign to outgrow having ingrown toenails. I also went to a Target store to not go in but to stay outside and have them bring out an order of supplies, and I went to the place where they make See's Candies.

I dunno how popular it is outside California but See's Candy is all the rage in this state. I gave up eating candy or anything of the sort around 2008 but back when I did eat that kind of thing, I struggled with See's assortments for reasons I explained in this post. That post also contains a link to a video tour of the building where I went yesterday but I was not allowed inside. No one was, not even into the part of the building that's usually a retail store.

Why I Went There: I have an elderly neighbor on whom I keep an eye and I occasionally drive her places she needs to go. She says she can't sleep at night unless just before bedtime, she consumes one of the Licorice Medallions they make at See's Candy. The local See's shops are, she told me, all out of that product and so is she. They're only available at the factory so I swung by for her. I am a very good neighbor.

Like I said, no one was allowed inside. On the door, there were signs explaining how it works: You order with a credit card either on their site or by calling a phone number which I had to dial eight times to get through to a human being. You order, you pay and then a lady in a HAZMAT suit comes to the door and hands you your goodies. I waited for ten minutes out there among a crowd of masked individuals and one loud lady who was proud of her unmaskedness and also — why will you not be surprised? — her Trump/Pence t-shirt.

As she extolled the virtues of the once and — and if she has her way, permanent president — she was so annoying that I finally turned to her and said, more for the crowd's benefit than hers, "Why are you campaigning for him in a state that he's going to lose by thirty-five points? Go campaign in Texas where the polls say he and Biden are tied."

She yelled — she didn't say, she yelled — "They're not tied! The polls are all lies! They said he had no chance to win in 2016!"

I said — I did not yell — "No, they said he had a slim chance and sometimes, slim chances happen. It sometimes rains when there's a 20% chance of rain. And the polls were right insofar as the popular vote was concerned."

She argued back that the election results were lies, too. Trump carried the popular vote by a huge margin and it would have been even bigger if Hillary had been sent to prison where she belongs. I asked her, "On what charges?" and of course, she couldn't name one. I think this lady just believes that anyone she doesn't like should be in prison. The guy she's voting for in November certainly does.

Understand that I was not trying to change this person's mind about a thing. I was just killing time, waiting for licorice and amusing those waiting for their chocolate-covered anythings. There are in this world Trump supporters with whom one can have an actual conversation and they accept a certain amount of reality. My most gung-ho-for-Donald friend admits that most of what we all say about the guy is true. He just prefers the Trump agenda to the alternatives and wishes there was a way to get it from someone who acts more presidential and doesn't swing wildly at every pitch.

Anyway, Ms. TrumpVoter and I went back and forth, much to the delight of the onlookers until a bagful of licorice was handed to me. I wished her Good Luck avoiding the virus and I told her, "You know, you could wear a mask and lessen your chances of getting it or infecting someone else and still support Donald Trump." She didn't seem to believe that and it may be the rottenest of all the rotten things that man has done to his fans…linking those two things.

Some film historian managed to find some of Liza Minnelli's screen tests for movies she didn't get. Some of you may think this is actually my pal Christine Pedi, who is famous for her Liza imitations…

As you probably know, the folks who would have brought you Comic-Con International next month will instead be bringing you Comic-Con at Home, a series of online video panels that will replicate (somewhat) the panels you might attend if they had the con and you were there for it. Some or all of these panels will be recorded in advance and I'm recording a Jack Kirby Tribute Panel and a Cartoon Voices Panel, plus I'll be on two or three others.

No, we are not going to attempt to do Quick Draw! Several folks came to me with elaborate (too elaborate) ideas on how to reconfigure and webcast that much-attended event. I decided none of them were technically feasible and of course, they all lacked the two most important elements, which are that it's live and that there's an audience that can be heard laughing at what the cartoonists do. If you want to see how awkward it would be to not have the second of these, just watch Bill Maher's show these days.

The Kirby panel and that Cartoon Voices panel will debut online during the dates when Comic-Con would have happened (July 22-26) and later will be viewable on my YouTube page, which you can reach at www.newsfromme.tv.

In the meantime, I am resuming my own webcasting next week. On Tuesday, June 23, I will be doing a long, live one-on-one interview with my pal Jim Brochu, who knows more about the theater than I know about…well, anything, really. If you love backstage showbiz anecdotes, you will overdose on what is heard when Jim and I get together. My current plan is to do one of these Conversations with some friend of mine every Tuesday night.

Then on Saturday, June 27, I will attempt another of the Cartoon Voices Panel done live. The last one we tried had to be halted in progress because there were riots and car fires being set a few blocks from me. Things seem to be quieter now so we'll give it another try with most of the folks who were on that panel. The ones who were on the one we couldn't complete and aren't on this one will be on other ones. Details to follow.

• Between his niece's book, Bolton's, the polls, SCOTUS decisions and all the rest, Trump must be so sick of winning. And this weekend, he gets the thrill of looking out at thousands of people and thinking, "They're all willing to die for me!"

I am a professional writer (next month will be 51 years) but I'm also, kind of on the side, a professional director of cartoon voices. I also host panels with cartoon voice actors at comic conventions and online.

At every panel, I make time for a little speech cautioning aspiring V.O. performers to beware of teachers and coaches who are not very good at teaching and coaching but who are sometimes very good at convincing you that you'll have the career of your dreams if you write them a very large check — or even a series of very large checks — to take lessons.

Please read and understand the following sentence: There are some very good, very honest teachers of voiceover but there are also some very poor ones and some of them are not very honest.

It is not unusual for the latter kind to offer very cheap introductory classes as a means of getting in touch with suckers aspiring voice actors. Those beginning classes may be worth what you pay for them but too often what happens is that they function like those free seminars that turn into relentless sales pitches to purchase time-shares.

They tell you how great you are and how you have such potential to become the next Frank Welker (or Rob Paulsen or Tara Strong or Nancy Cartwright, etc.) if only you had that little bit of instruction and polish that they can give you. You will be stunned at how much they'll charge you for that little bit of instruction and polish.

Beware, beware, beware.

Voiceover is a lucrative field for — and I need to use boldface again here — some people. Like any glamorous, well-paying show-bizzy career, the vast majority of those who aspire to the field do not achieve the success they seek. That is not possible due to the simple math of X number of jobs and at least 10X the number of applicants…and some would say it's more like 100X or more. One of the good things an honest, professional coach can do for you is to give you an honest appraisal of your talents.

The honest ones I know will not take your money if they don't think you have a good shot at a career. The dishonest ones will always tell you you're so close; you just need their deluxe, even-more-expensive master class. Bank accounts — students' or their parents' — have been wiped clean by those additional deluxe classes.

How do you know who the good and honest ones are? I'm not going to name names here; just urging caution. Generally speaking, there should be a real, successful career connected with them. Either they've had one or they're recommended by folks who've had them. You should know the names of people who've had the kind of career you seek. Many of them are reachable via social media. Most of them will respond to an e-mail or D.M. asking them for a recommendation.

Don't pester him with questions but do spend some time at this page that was set up by one of the best, most in-demand voice actors working today, Dee Bradley Baker. There are coaches who will charge you thousands of bucks to give you less good advice than you can get for free on Dee's site. Some of those coaches, by the way, have real slick, professional-looking websites.

(And don't pester me, especially if you haven't studied every single page of that site. And while I occasionally participate in classes run by others, I don't teach and probably never will.)

As you might imagine, I am motivated to deliver these cautionary lectures because I have seen some horrible exploitations. We're talking about young (mostly) folks who shelled out vast sums of dough on lessons and at the end of those classes, all that resulted was that they were told they needed to pay for more lessons. In a couple of instances, a loving parent forked over money they could really not afford, trying to help their kid achieve his/her "dream" profession…and the kid got nowhere.

I am not trying to scare you away from voice teachers. Like I keep boldfacing here, there are some wonderful ones. I'm trying to scare you away from the kind that took $12,000 from one poor lady who thought she was buying her daughter a career. I heard the daughter's demo and an honest coach would have told her that she simply didn't have the talent necessary to make it in The Business and should seek out a different profession.

The last I heard, the daughter was indeed working in front of a microphone. It's the one at a Romano's Macaroni Grill and she uses it to tell waiting customers their table is ready. You can master that skill for way under $12,000.

The TV show M*A*S*H debuted on CBS in September of 1972. While it wasn't the biggest of hits at first, it did well enough that a few months later, CBS apparently wanted another series that was not unlike it. Not long before, Paramount had released the movie version of Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 and, as with most such deals, there was a clause in there allowing the studio to bring forth a TV version.

So here we have the 1973 unsold pilot for a weekly Catch-22 TV series. Richard Dreyfuss, who was not yet a movie star of note, played the role Alan Arkin had played in the film. Hal Dresner, who had written a couple of first-season M*A*S*H episodes did the teleplay. Richard Quine directed and the cast also included Dana Elcar, Nicholas Hammond (who would soon star in the first live-action Spider-Man TV show) and my buddy Frank Welker. Frank pretty much gave up on-camera performing a few years later to become the most-often-heard cartoon voice actor in the history of mankind.

I can see why this did not become a regular series and if you watch it, you'll probably come up with even more reasons. One though is one of the worst "sweetening" jobs I've ever heard on a TV show. There's a way to do canned laughter that isn't constantly reminding you that it's not genuine. They didn't get that kind…

A couple of folks have written to ask why I'm not outraged that Gone With the Wind is being withdrawn from someplace in reaction to something having to do with Black Lives Matter. I love the history and majesty of film (and other art forms) as much as anyone but I can't summon up any dudgeon, high or otherwise, about this or about how Disney won't release Song of the South or Warner Brothers won't put out fancy Blu-rays of cartoons with racial stereotypes. None of this stuff has ceased to exist. It is at worst, mildly inconvenient to view and sometimes, the copies are not pristine.

You want to see Gone With the Wind or show it to someone? You can rent it on Amazon for $3.99 or better still, buy a copy. Then they can never take it away from you.

I cannot right now think of a single movie that I would like to see but can't. If I come up with one, it's probably unavailable because there's been so little interest in it (i.e., so little financial incentive) that whoever has a copy has it deep in some vault 'cause there ain't no money in hauling it out. Before home video — which wasn't that long ago — it was difficult to see a lot of movies. Now, it's difficult to think of one you can't see. I think we have bigger problems in this world to think about.

Please stop sending me requests to plug your Kickstarter project or anything else crowd-funded. I know what you're doing is wonderful and that you have the talent and integrity to bring it to fruition and that it will be super-sensational and will change my life for the better. I also know that since 2013, I have backed and paid money to eleven Kickstarter campaigns and six more via other crowd-funding websites..and of the seventeen projects, I've received eight.

Some of those eight were quite good and they arrived fairly close to when they were supposed to be delivered and what I received was pretty much what was promised. But eight out of seventeen is not an acceptable percentage. One took my money in 2013 and another in 2015 and all I've received to date for that loot are some periodic e-mails detailing their problems and promising that the project is close to completion.

This has led to me becoming disinclined to ever order anything else that is crowd-funded; not unless it's the endeavor of someone I know really, really, really well. Just knowing them really, really well is not sufficient.

One item I backed but never received was apparently actually produced. It was a book and it didn't come and didn't come and didn't come…and then one day, I noticed someone on some web forum saying they enjoyed their copy. So I wrote to the gent who produced it and he wrote back that yes, he got it published and he sent them out to everyone and if I didn't get mine, well, that was just too bad. It was my fault, he said, for not letting him know I hadn't received it before he sold out of all his copies.

I still can't figure out how I was supposed to figure out it was published and everyone else was getting their copies. Such are the mysteries of crowdfunding.

KTLA Channel 5 in Los Angeles was the first commercially licensed television station in the western United States. It went on the air in 1947 as an enterprise of Paramount Pictures and an awful lot of programs originated from its studios.

In 1987, the station produced a 40-year retrospective called KTLA at 40 and the clip below is an excerpt from that special. Stan Freberg — who as you'll hear started his TV career with a show on KTLA — hosted this segment about programming for kids, not just at KTLA but on other local stations as well. In separate clips here, you'll meet Jimmy Weldon, who hosted cartoons on Channel 13 and Vance Colvig, who played Bozo the Clown on Channel 5. No mention is made that Vance's father Pinto was the actor who first played Bozo, nor is it mentioned that on the Hanna-Barbera Yakky Doodle cartoons, Weldon supplied the voice of Yakky and Vance Colvig was the voice of his bulldog pal Chopper.

I kinda grew up, to the extent I grew up at all, on those guys plus Skipper Frank, Engineer Bill, Sheriff John, Tom Hatten and other kids' show hosts on local television, seen here in some of the few pieces of video that have survived of these babysitters. I also grew up to a great extent on Stan Freberg and Daws Butler…

If you pay a lot (or even any) attention to political polls, read Nathaniel Rakich on how to read the things.

While I've got you here, let me clear something up: I said in this post that "the Rasmussen Poll, which usually favors Republicans, had Trump twelve points behind." Actually, the Rasmussen Poll has Trump five points behind. It's pollster Scott Rasmussen who has Trump twelve points behind.

Scott Rasmussen founded the Rasmussen Poll in 2003, left the company in 2013 and now does his own independent polling. The company he founded still bears his name but it ain't his poll any longer. I am hardly the first or even the thousandth person to make reference to "the Rasmussen Poll" without being aware there are two of them.

Hey, take a few minutes and enjoy this interview with Jon Stewart. He has a new movie coming out so I suppose we'll see a lot of him the next few weeks. We could do with more Jon Stewart. Here's an excerpt…

It's the wildest thing. I've never seen anybody who can say in the same breath, as the president does, "I am in charge, only I can fix this, and I take no responsibility." You cannot process that. So what you have to process is the actual process: How do masks help? Do they help? You have to really explain it to people, but we allow the mask-wearing to be reduced to its symbolic meaning. Things like masks can't just become another avatar of political representation. That's where we go wrong.

As you can see in the previous dispatch, I expected to awake this morning to news of something maddening and pernicious done by that awful guy in the White House. Instead, we have the news that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 bans discrimination in the workplace against LGBTQ employees. What's more, it comes at a time when the Trump administration has been trying to remove all such protections…

…and, what's even more, it was a 6-3 decision with Chief Justice Roberts siding with the majority as did Neil Gorsuch, who authored the opinion. Neil Gorsuch was a Trump appointee, remember. And the working premise was that a Trump appointee would be lockstep-loyal to Trump and to right-wing causes. Donald has to be seething, especially with the pending SCOTUS decision about whether he has to turn over his tax records.

Has there been a presidential tweet yet calling Gorsuch a back-stabbing traitor? Trump is totally transactional. If he does something for you, you owe him absolute fealty.

Okay. That's all the news I'm going to look at for a while. A script awaits.

Here's another clip from Robin and the 7 Hoods. This is Bing Crosby's big number, "Mr. Booze." And I remember thinking even at age twelve that Peter Falk (who I'd recently discovered in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World) had stolen this movie from allegedly-bigger stars. Here, he and Victor Buono upstage Crosby, Frank, Dino and Sammy…

A lot of folks are making something out of Donald Trump, during his speech at West Point, having trouble walking down a ramp and having a teensy bit of trouble taking a sip from a glass of water. There was much wrong with that speech, starting with the fact that those cadets were summoned to be there in person when anyone else would have let them "attend" online and not risk disease. There was also nothing said about Trump's current difficulties with the military in which these cadets will serve.

Having trouble walking down a ramp? Big deal. I'm younger than he is and I have trouble walking down some ramps.

In other news, Trump demanded a retraction and apology from CNN because of a poll they released showing him fourteen points behind Joe Biden. Given that no retraction or apology could possibly come from such demands, was it a good idea to make that charge and call more attention to it? All the major polls show Biden with a lead well beyond the margin of error and with some surprisingly-close numbers in some states that ought to be easy wins for any Republican. Even the Rasmussen Poll, which usually favors Republicans, had Trump twelve points behind Joe B. Of course, much can happen.

I'm now segueing back to scripts I need to write. Let's see how far I can get into the work week before Trump does something to yank my attention away from my profession. With my luck, it'll be tomorrow morning before The Today Show is over.