Monthly Archives: December 2022

David Letterman's Netflix series recently featured an interview Dave did with Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Netflix is making it available for free viewing…

Oh, why can't Christmas last twelve days like in the song? I don't want lords a-leaping or geese a-laying. I don't even want more presents. I just want more of the good spirits and friendliness of the past few days.

Today, I'm allowing myself to look a bit at the news sections of the 'net. If you're unclear on what "The Hunter Biden Laptop Scandal" thing is all about, this article seems like a good, balanced explainer.

Red State Governors are again busing migrant workers to places where those migrants may not wish to go. This sounds like a very cruel, heartless thing to do and according to Kevin Drum, that's the whole point of it. Some voters want politicians to treat these people like animals.

William Saletan breaks down what Donald Trump was doing on January 6…you know, instead of calling in the National Guard to stop the destruction and violence.

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Leaving that kind of politics: I have a number of e-mails asking me if I think the Writers Guild is going to go on strike when the current contract is up on May 1 of 2023. My answer is that, first of all, there's always a chance the Guild will strike if the Producers offer a terrible deal. They've done it before and we'll do it again if they do. You can't say if someone is going to accept an offer if you have no idea what that offer will be.

But generally, I haven't paid enough attention to this matter to have an opinion worth offering here. I used to be very much involved in WGA matters and now I'm not. This article summarized the situation in the middle of last November and I see no reason to think things have changed…or will until we get much closer to the first of May. Fingers crossed, the Guild won't get an offer that will be unacceptable.

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Lastly for now: I continue to be amazed at how readers of this site can sometimes come up with information that I thought was impossible. Recently in this article, I posted a photo of me at some single-digit age posing, none too comfortably, with a Department Store Santa. In various posts here, I mentioned that I had no idea which department store it was, though I mentioned that my family most often shopped at Robinson's, Bullock's or The May Company. I thought it was a question that could never be answered.

And then I got an e-mail from Jon Francis, who lives in Redondo Beach. He writes, "The picture with Santa Claus shown on the 21st was taken at Bullock's. I have a picture of me with the same Santa, still in the original folder. Santa is making the same finger up gesture." Wow. Thanks, Jon.

It's the last night of Hanukkah. Let's spend it in Santa Monica with the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. This may be my favorite rendition of Tom Lehrer's song…and if you're sad it's over, just go to YouTube and do a search. You'll be amazed how many people have made videos of this tune.  Now that it's public domain, expect a lot more…

This is a rerun of a piece I published here on Christmas Day of 2010 but I have made a few changes in it. It's about a gift exchange with a TV producer for whom I once worked and when I first posted it, I disguised his name with a pseudonym. He was still alive then and while I thought he would have a sense of humor about me telling the tale online, I wasn't sure. Even before he passed away, I decided I was worrying needlessly and when I asked a close friend of his about it, the friend said, "Oh, Alan would laugh about that now." So I went back this time and inserted the real name…

There could still be a late arrival but it looks like this is going to be the first Christmas in quite some time when no one sent me alcohol. All my friends know I don't drink that stuff…not even beer or wine. Somehow, each year, one or more friends forget and I wind up with a bottle or three that has to be given away. Once in a while, the recipients of this regifting are very impressed with the rarity and price of some wine or liqueur and very glad that I don't appreciate or want it.

In the eighties, the rerouting of such gifts was easier. My mother worked each holiday season at Jurgensen's, a gourmet-type grocery and liquor store in Beverly Hills. Until they promoted her to a job that anyone else could have done, she was the head gift-wrapper…and let me brag: My mother in her prime was the best gift-wrapper you ever saw. They were exquisite.

If you were fortunate enough to get a gift wrapped by my mother, you might well not open it because what was inside could not possibly be as beautiful as the exterior. I sent out some expensive gifts back then and it only dawned on me later that I could have gotten away with giving bags of garbage if I'd had my mother wrap them. No one would ever have found out.

Anyway, when I was working on Welcome Back, Kotter, my mother and I invented the Instant Gift Redirect. Our Executive Producer Jimmie Komack used Jurgensen's that year to send wine to everyone he knew. My mother spotted my address on a list and called me up and said, "I have a bottle of Chateau Lafite Something [I forget the name] here for you from Jimmie Komack. What do you want me to do with it?"

"Send it to my agent," I told her and I gave her the address and told her what to write on the card. The next day, she called up to say, "I have a bottle of wine here for you from your agent. What do you want me to do with it?" I told her to send it to Jimmie Komack.

We did this for years…as long as she worked for Jurgensen's. Sometimes, it wasn't as neatly symmetrical as that but it spared me having a lot of bottles around I didn't want. Often of course, I received wine that didn't come from Jurgensen's but we had a solution for that, too. I'd take those bottles over to my parents' house when I visited and my mother would sneak them into Jurgensen's and send them out for me via Jurgensen's delivery methods.

After we did this for a while, she felt guilty so she told the manager and offered to have the costs deducted from her paycheck. The manager laughed, decided it was a great idea and he began bringing in unwanted bottles that had been delivered to his home and having them sent out to others.

My favorite moment in all this came when I was working for Alan Landsburg, a very important TV producer and, by his own admission, a wine snob. The one time he allowed me into his home, I was subjected to a ritual that was apparently required of all visitors — a tour of his wine cellar. It was huge and temperature-controlled and filled with bottles that he fingered like rare Ming Dynasty artifacts.

Though I tried to explain to him that I did not know one wine from another, he would cradle one and say, as if it was the most impressive thing one could possibly say, "This is a 1947 Bordeaux from the hinterlands of [Somewhere-or-Other] and it was bottled on a Thursday by the infamous Maria." Then he'd wait for me to adopt a jealous expression and indicate that I realized what an awesome thing that was to own.

I learned to just go "Wowww" a lot. I also learned that he took his wine seriously. Didn't even snicker when I asked, "Hey, you got any Manischewitz around this dump?" and followed it up by inquiring, "What's a good year for Ripple?"

So, getting back to Jurgensen's: That same year, my mother called and said, "I have a bottle here for you from Alan Landsburg. Where do you want me to send it?" I thought for a second and told her, "Send it to Alan Landsburg." I thought it would make a nice Christmas present…give Alan back his own wine.

It saved me shopping for something. It saved me getting it delivered and paying for it and it also saved me having to figure out to do with that bottle of wine. But the best moment came when we went back to work after the holidays. Alan came by my desk to thank me for the wine. Then he leaned in carefully and said, "Listen, next time you send out wine to people as a gift, check with me and I'll suggest a few. It's important to make a good impression in this town and you don't want people to think you're the kind of guy who'd give out that kind of wine."

I just love this little video. It was designed by R.O. Blechman as a station break for CBS back in 1966 and every year, I get e-mails asking me to post it again. You can read all about Mr. Blechman here but first, watch this…

It's the next-to-last night of this. Here's Michael Feinstein. Join him in the second chorus if you're so inclined…

Cartoonist Joshua Held created this video several years ago using The Drifters' recording of "White Christmas." I feature it here every year and before I do, I get e-mails from people asking me when I'm going to post it. The answer is "Now." Someone recently remastered it in 3-D — with Mr. Held's blessing, I hope — but I prefer the original 2-D…

I'm taking Christmas Eve Day off and maybe Christmas Day as well but there will be new content here which I prepared ahead of time. And here's a replay from 2012 which I last posted here in 2015. It's the story of my family's last Christmas tree…

So here I was in this family where my father was Jewish and my mother was not. But she learned. Of course, all she really learned was how to cook a few Jewish staples like brisket and latkes but that was enough. More than enough.  Remind me to tell you in one of these what it was that caused both families to drop their opposition to my parents' mixed marriage. (Hint: It was the birth of me…or actually, the impending birth of me.)

In our home, we celebrated Hanukkah. I always thought that since I was half-Jewish, I should only light four candles. We also celebrated Christmas and got a big tree. The acquisition of the tree — going to the lot, picking one out, haggling with the salesguy — was a big part of the holidays. My mother, being the least Jewish of the three of us, was more or less in charge of the tree. All my father contributed was to pay for the tree and drive it and us home.

My mother was a purist: No artificial colors on the tree. No flocking. Just a plain, simple green one. We'd position it in one corner of the living room in front of the fireplace that never had a fire in it, and we'd decorate. She and I.

We had two kinds of decorations. My Uncle Aaron was in the window display business. He sold low-cost, pre-fab ones that were made in Hong Kong or elsewhere in the Orient. He'd design them and sell them to stores that needed something simple and cheap to pop into the front window. He also sometimes bid on and would win contracts to supply street decorations to cities.

Uncle Aaron had crates of Christmas ornaments. They cost him almost nothing and he'd give us boxes and boxes of them. We gave a lot of them to neighbors and sometimes, my friend Rick and I would invent a game that involved smashing a box of sixteen. I eventually outgrew thinking it was fun to break things but I enjoyed it at the time.

The hard part of decorating our tree each year was in not cluttering it with too many decorations…because we sure had too many. I'd usually put the balls in place, step back to look at my handiwork, then remove about half of them.

We also had to leave room for my mother's decorations. She had a small box of ornaments from her childhood, including a lovely star to place atop the tree. I don't think they were valuable in a monetary sense but they were priceless to her. I'd put on Uncle Aaron's ornaments and it didn't matter if I broke one or two or twenty. Like I said, we had crates. But my mother's half-dozen ornaments were handled by her and placed on the tree with great care. Then when Christmas was over and it was time for the tree to go away, the first step would be for her to carefully remove her decorations and pack them away for another year.

We did this until I was twelve. In 1964, Uncle Aaron died and we decided not to have a tree that year. It would have been festooned with his ornaments and would just have reminded us that he wasn't around. We didn't have one in '65 or '66 and a few months prior to Christmas of '68, we gave the garage-full of Uncle Aaron's ornaments — I almost just typed "Uncle Aaron's balls" — to a local charity that came and carried them away. My mother made certain that her memento ornaments were not included and I saved the lights and one box of Uncle Aaron's just in case Rick and I ever wanted to play one of our ornament-smashing games again.

As we approached Christmas of that year, my mother admitted she was a little depressed. '68 was a rough year in this country and it had finally "sunk in" for her that we were never going to have a Christmas tree again. When she'd suggested giving away the ornaments in the garage, she hadn't realized the emotional impact of that decision.

So I went out and got her a tree.

Not a big tree. A small tree. It was the symbolism that counted, not the actual tree. And besides, I didn't drive back then so I had to carry it home from the lot up on Pico Boulevard. I selected one that was under three feet, took it home when my parents were out and decorated it with the ornaments I'd saved to smash with Rick and the lights I'd kept. My mother was very happy to come home and find it…and to add her childhood ornaments to the display.

They'd been out buying the ingredients for our Christmas dinner. I think it was pot roast and latkes that year and the meal was a big hit.

So was the tree. Enough time had passed that it didn't bother Aunt Dot (Uncle Aaron's widow) to see a display that contained a reminder of him. It was, in fact, rather pleasant. And we never had another tree again. It didn't seem necessary and I didn't think we could top the short one. Maybe one of these days, I will…and I'll add in my mother's ornaments. That's assuming I can find them.

And this one's from Lea Kalisch with Rabbi T on the guitar…

J. Plus (please leave me real names, people) wrote to ask…

You mentioned once in an interview that when you were a kid, you loved to read the credits on the TV shows you liked. How do you feel about the credits on shows you've worked on? Was it a thrill to see your name on the screen?

It was more of a thrill for my parents…especially my father. He was never happier than when he could turn on the TV and see his son's name. If he'd had his way, any thirty-minute show I wrote would have consisted of five seconds of program and 29 minutes and 55 seconds of my name on screen.

And you know how people can know something but still not quite accept it? My father understood that when I got paid for a show was not when my name was on the screen…but somehow, when he saw my name on the screen, he thought, "Mark got paid this week." Even though I'd sometimes been paid months earlier.

Since it's the Christmas season, I'll tell you the screen credits I liked most on a show I wrote…and they didn't even involve my name. In 1982, I wrote a prime-time Yogi Bear holiday special for Hanna-Barbera. It was a last-minute assignment, there were huge fights and some yelling but it got on the air and every so often, I like to look at the voice credits. They were spread out over two cards and here's one of them…

Daws Butler deservedly received special billing, though they misspelled the name of Mr. Jinks and they omitted other iconic roles Daws played in the show such as Dixie the Mouse, Augie Doggie, Snooper, Blabber and Wally Gator.  Daws was one of the key voices of my childhood.  I loved any cartoon he was in, whether it was a Warner Brothers cartoon, a Jay Ward cartoon, a Walter Lantz cartoon or a Hanna-Barbera cartoon.  I loved him.  He was a dear, sweet man who taught a wonderful class full of up-and-coming voice actors who also loved him dearly.

Daws had suffered a stroke and this show was his return to voice acting after many months of not doing what he did better than just about anybody.  There are moments in some lives where you feel that you're connecting with an important part of your upbringing and this was a big one for me.

I was also connecting with names on this other card…

Georgi Irene was a child actor and a very good one.  All the other names on this list were people who voiced cartoons of my childhood…and some of them, like Hal Smith and Allan Melvin, were also on live-action TV shows I watched when I was growing up.  In 1982, this was kind of an All-Star Lineup of Voice Actors for me and in most cases here, they were playing the same characters.  Mel Blanc, for example, was playing Barney Rubble.

I worked with most of them on other shows but, Ms. Irene aside, this could have been the voice cast on a cartoon I watched when I was ten.  It was kind of the same way I felt when I wrote comic books that were drawn by the artists who drew comic books I read when I was seven or wrote lines for live-action shows that were spoken by actors who appeared in shows I watched when my age was in single digits.

If you don't get why this felt special to me, there may be no way I can explain it.  It just did.

A few years ago, animator Doug Compton produced this amazing and clever video for Stan Freberg's 1955 record, Nuttin' for Christmas. A lot of folks think that Daws Butler, who worked with Stan on many of his projects, was the voice of the burglar but they're wrong. The kid and the burglar were both voiced by Mr. Freberg…

Devin Stone, aka The "Legal Eagle" of the Internet, explains all about the criminal referral that the January 6 committee has made to the Justice Guys. Mr. Stone has a second new video about this up on his "members only" page and I'll post it here if and when it's released to the non-paying public.

Whether you're pro-Trump or not, we're going to be living with this matter for most of '23 and probably some of '24 and it might be nice to really understand what's going on with it. I'm not entirely sure how I'd want it to end other than that I'd like the citizens of this country who do not get their desired outcome to understand why not and not think the process was rigged. I know that's a lot to ask these days.

Brian Dreger has another good question…

You have mentioned that at one point you had a writing partner, Dennis Palumbo. Is there any advantage to having a partner when writing for television (I am assuming that is what the two of you were doing when you were partners)? Do you both need to have the same agent to do that? Do you split the salary of a staff writer, or are you both just single writers who happen to work together on the project at hand? Do you both "audition" for a staff writing position as a team? Do other writers in the room resent that you have a partner? Does it cause a lot of friction or "joke counting" (who had the most jokes survive and make it to air)?

Dennis and I teamed up in 1975 because at that moment, TV comedy writers almost always came in pairs. There were exceptions, though a good many of those who wrote alone had broken into the field as a member of a writing duo and then gone their separate ways. I'm not sure exactly why this was — or if it's that way these days — but in '75, if you thought you could make it as a comedy writer, the prevailing bit of advice was "Find a partner."

Yes, you usually need to have the same agent to do that. Dennis and I were a team when we signed with an agency. After we I split up — amicably, because we wanted to go in different directions — I wrote a few scripts with a lady named Marion Freeman. Marion had been part of a team and she and her partner had split up around the same time. Both teams had the same agents so one of our mutual agents put Marion and Yours Truly together, though we both also worked without the other during that period.

Later, I teamed up (briefly) with another female writer for one project and we did not have the same agent. Her agent and my agent got together on the phone and agreed that my guy would represent the team on this project and her guy would represent the team on the next one if there was a next one. They would split all commissions. That writer and I did not get along, the project went nowhere and (of course) there was no next one. But that kind of situation is very rare. Usually, one agency represents a team.

Sometimes, a team splits one writer fee. Sometimes, you negotiate for a higher fee because you're a team and you split that. You usually "audition" and are hired as a team but there have been times when some producer has met Writer A independently of Writer B and he wants to put them together as a team so he can pay them one writer fee instead of two. The Writers Guild has usually stopped this practice if they know about it.

I don't think other writers resent working with a team. I don't think it leads to any more joke-counting than if the room is full of unpaired writers.

Getting back to your first question: I think it sometimes is an advantage to write with a partner, especially when you're new. You have someone on your side to tell you that one of your big ideas really sucks before the producer or story editor would have to tell you. When you're drawing a blank, your partner may have an idea. In the case of the team of Evanier and Palumbo, Dennis was much better at the "pitching" part of the job than I was. I could not have "sold" my own work as well as he was able to sell ours…and he was a very good writer on his own, as he has since proven.

TV writing is usually a highly collaborative experience with most projects involving other writers as well as directors, producers, actors, network execs and others who have input into a script. There are personal stories that you may need to write by yourself…but if it's the kind of project that's going to be written by six people in a room with eighteen more having input, it can be helpful to have one of the others be a fixture in your life and career because you can backstop each other.

Disadvantages? Well, there are dozens but the first that comes to mind is the need to write when your partner is available. In the wee hours of this morning, I couldn't sleep so I got up about 3 AM and wrote for two or three hours before going back to bed. It's tough to do that when you write with a partner who's miles away, sleeping like a baby.  And when career decisions have to be made, there's a difference between asking yourself the question, "Is this good for me?" and asking, "Is this good for us?"

Mostly though, I was glad I met Dennis when I was starting out.  When you're almost certain to get lost in the woods, it's better to have someone with you to help figure out where the hell you are and how to get to wherever the two of you are going. That is, if you're both trying to get to the same place.

This version is by Sam Broverman and I think it's from a CD called A Jewish Boy's Christmas. He tampered with the lyrics a bit and even plunges into Yiddish…

• When I was young, the thing I could never figure out about Santa was how he was bringing me and my friends the Mattel, Wham-O, Hasbro, Milton Bradley and other brand-name toys we asked for. Were the elves in his workshop making illegal knock-offs?