Monthly Archives: February 2024

After years of rumors and even announcements that proved to be premature, it's finally happening: The Tropicana — one of the oldest mega-resorts in Las Vegas — will close April 2 and will soon after be torn down and asunder to build a big, huge, colossal baseball stadium to house the A's.

The word is that this is not the end of that hotel; that they'll tear it down, build the new stadium and then at some point build something that will be called The Tropicana on whatever remaining ground there is to build upon. But it's certainly the end of what's there now.

Which doesn't bother me one bit. It has long been a place that seemed likely to fall down on its own if urban renewal didn't beat gravity to the punch. It was an unremarkable place offering nothing that twelve dozen other casinos aren't offering and offering better.

No, my regret (if you can call it that) is that another vestige of Old Vegas is biting the felt. Old Vegas, like New Vegas, existed so you could lose oodles of loot at the slots, the tables, the wheels and every other kind of gaming they could offer.

The difference was that your losses in Old Vegas could be mitigated a bit by cheap food, cheap shows, cheap rooms and cheap tourist-trappers. New Vegas does away with all that unprofitable mitigation. Oh, you can sometimes score a cheap hotel room but it's only cheap until they tack on the Mandatory Resort Fee.

And there's plenty to look at but eventually you're going to need to eat. Or do something besides sight-see. Anyone want to guess what they'll charge for a seat to see a game or anything at the [Whatever Corporation Buys The Naming Rights] stadium?

I used to love going to Old Vegas. All I can do now is hope maybe they're hiding it in Reno or Laughlin.

As I said, the lost posting on this site has been located and restored — and in record time. I posted my request for it at 11:17 AM and helpful responses began arriving at 11:27, starting with one from Corey Klemow. You people are amazing.

The restored post can be viewed here for those who missed it. The video link may now be only watchable on YouTube and the bookmark may be off a few seconds but you can figure that out. Thanks, Corey!

Thanks to many of you, the missing post has been found. It will reappear in its rightful place shortly.

A few weeks ago here, we were discussing the Python/Marty Feldman skit I was calling "The Bookshop Sketch."  Remember that?  Of course you do.

The last posting I did about that had as its subject line, "More About The Bookshop Sketch" and it seems to have disappeared. Some tech glitch in the software or something.

I know that among those who read this site, there are those who use readers that capture the postings here or otherwise retain copies for offline reading. If you have a copy of the post called "More About The Bookshop Sketch," please help me to its proper place on this blog's chronology. Thank you.

Anthony Escartin sent this one in…

Good day, Mark! I become one of your many fans when Groo was at Epic. When I found your blog, I realized I'd been a fan of yours for even longer, starting from when I was reading Bugs Bunny comics as a child and watching The Wuzzles.

I have a question for you regarding some of the projects you've worked on, and some projects you didn't end up working on. How do you decide which projects you can (or can't) disclose on the blog?

I mean, aside from the legal stuff like non-disclosure agreements. I ask because in a recent post, you talked about meeting for a job on Barbie and the Oscars, but I'm dying to know about other projects that you don't mention by name. For example, what was that one show that you worked on for Lou Scheimer and Filmation? Thank you for your time!

In the 52-or-so years I've been writing for a living, I've had literally thousands of what some would call "offers" but a fairly small percentage of them had any real possibility of turning into real projects. Even if I'd said an enthusiastic "Yes, yes, yes" to that Barbie movie or the chance to write on The Oscars, I'm not sure either of them would ever have turned into anything more than talk.

So a lot of the things I don't mention here or anywhere are things I never allow myself to think were going to happen or had even a 20% chance. I have friends who get wildly optimistic about every opportunity that's so much as lightly dangled and that, of course, can only lead to cyclonic disappointment.

I did work on one show for Filmation — a bible and pilot script for a series. A network bought it, I received my series sale bonus…and then the crew at the studio began monkeying around with it, mostly to add elements that could be merchandised. I didn't like what it turned into so I removed my name from it and am not going to reattach it here. I've done that a few times and I think it was the right move. Just in case it was, I'd like to keep it that way.

This is a partial rerun of a post that ran here on November 11, 2019…

In 1977, the film The Goodbye Girl was a surprise smash hit. It had a screenplay by Neil Simon and its two leads — Marsha Mason and Richard Dreyfuss — were nominated for Academy Awards, as was the film itself. Dreyfuss won his category, becoming at the time the youngest Best Actor in Oscar history. Very much a successful film.

In 1992, it was announced that Mr. Simon was transforming his screenplay into a Broadway musical of the same name. If ever an upcoming show looked like a guaranteed smash, this was it. Just the fact that it was Neil Simon and a beloved storyline sold a lot of tickets. When it was announced that David Zippel and Marvin Hamlisch were doing the music and Michael Kidd was directing, they sold more. And they probably couldn't have found two bigger stars to star than Bernadette Peters and Martin Short.

The advance sale was huge. So were the problems during rehearsals and tryouts. So was the disappointment of many when the show finally opened on March 4, 1993. The previous Neil Simon musical, They're Playing Our Song, ran for 1,082 performances. The Goodbye Girl closed after 188.

How could "the show that couldn't fail" fail? There were many factors and in his autobiography, Mr. Simon blamed everyone but Mr. Simon, implying he thought it was a terrible idea to try to make that movie into a stage musical. He didn't really explain though why he agreed to do it. I mean, it wasn't like he needed the money or the credit.

I saw one of the 188 performances and we somehow got tickets at the last minute…in the front row! I liked parts of it, especially David Zippel's lyrics which I thought were often funnier than what was coming out of the actors' mouths when they weren't singing. Before I explain what I didn't like, give me a sec to put up one of these…

There. Read on at your own risk. Like most musicals, the plot was about two people who shouldn't be together and maybe don't even like each other for most of Act One winding up very much in love. Anna never imagined she'd fall for the King of Siam. Marian the Librarian was repulsed at first by the traveling salesman, Harold Hill. Eliza Doolittle never dreamed she'd care about Henry Higgins…and in The Goodbye Girl, Paula McFadden (Bernadette on stage) never thought she'd have anything but disdain for Martin Short's character, Elliot Garfield.

You know how it's going to end before they even start the overture but you're going to pretend you don't, just as you pretend you don't see the wires that fly Peter Pan around, just as you pretend you don't know the ending of any play you've seen before. Well, with The Goodbye Girl, it was hard to pretend. From the moment he set foot on that stage, Martin Short was so funny and so adorable that you got angry with Bernadette's character for not falling in love with him ten minutes into the play. After fifteen, I wanted to marry him. That she kept treating this hilarious, wondrous guy like crap was more frustrating than amusing.

I also thought the set was confusing and that Short snuck in too many Ed Grimley gestures along with the occasional taste of Jerry Lewis. He made you laugh but as Martin Short, not as Elliot Garfield. I liked him better (but laughed at him less) a few years later in a revival of Little Me.

But you can see a little of the show for yourself here. This is the Press Reel offering video excerpts for TV reviewers to use in their reviews…

Another Chita Rivera number. She did this in a show I saw her do at the Westwood Playhouse in — I'm guessing — 1979. I didn't know until I saw this clip that it was written by Kander and Ebb but I probably should have guessed. The video is a bit out of sync but she never was…

Here's a letter from my longtime pal Bruce Reznick…and lemme tell you how long I've known Bruce. The year we first met, Charlie Chaplin released his last movie, Muhammad Ali was still Cassius Clay and he was stripped of his boxing championship for refusing to go fight in the Vietnam War, and the highest-rated TV program in this country was The Andy Griffith Show,

Bruce will probably write and tell me I have the year wrong and if he does, he's probably right since he's one of the smartest guys I've ever known. His specialty is mathematics and he took time out from trisecting angles to send me this about writing on a computer…

Hi, Mark. I can tell you my experiences, which are different from yours, but lead to the same conclusion.

Typing a math paper usually requires symbols and letters from other alphabets, and when I started, before word processing computers, it required special symbol balls on IBM selectrics. (On PhD theses, which are not actually published, a lot of symbols were written in by hand.) You wrote your paper as best you could and sent it to the typist, and didn't do much revisions after that.

Once mathematicians got computers, we got programs that let us write symbols ourselves and papers ourselves. It takes a little longer because we go through way more revisions, but we can get the paper to look like what we want.

My father used to say of a draft that it "needs to be run through the typewriter again". A disadvantage of the current system is that you can passively keep parts you don't want to think about, even when it would be better if you started from scratch.

I had issues with typists because my handwriting wasn't very good. My favorite example was a paper in which I wrote in pencil "One often is interested in questions of the following kind," and the very patient typist wrote: "One of ten is interested in questions of the following kind". I wish.

The more I write on a computer, the harder it is to believe that I wrote my first work on that little Olivetti-Underwood manual portable that I have in my garage. It really now looks like something I must have found at a toy store.

I used that Fischer-Price plaything for my earliest professional work including scripts for DC, Disney and Gold Key. Then I upgraded to electric and Selectric and finally to my first word processor. I think my work was getting better during this period — or as some might say, less rotten — and some of that was simple experience. But some of it was the tool of my trade: The computer. I know it led me to do more revisions and had other benefits as well.

My friend Harlan Ellison worked the way he worked and it obviously worked for him. But one time at his house, in a workroom built to disadvantage someone of my height, he sat me down at his desk and asked me to type out, on his typewriter, some notes for an article he was doing for Playboy on the then-current comic book scene. If you're wondering how Groo the Wanderer got into that article…well, that's how.

Harlan wrote brilliant stories and essays on that typewriter on that desk sitting in that chair. I couldn't write so much as a colon..and not even a whole colon but one of the semi variety. I wound up sitting on the floor doing it in longhand on a legal pad. The way some of us work is simply that personal. We can make exceptions for special circumstances but our main, real work is done how and where we feel at home. Which is why I would never tell another writer how he or she should work or what they should write on.

Dick Van Dyke and Chita Rivera have a nice chat at the Kennedy Center Awards ceremony…