Monthly Archives: June 2013

In the mid-to-late seventies, there were a lot of memorable comedians to be seen up at the Comedy Store in Hollywood: Pryor, Letterman, Leno, Dangerfield, etc. The one some patrons will never forget was Lenny Schultz. He was big in New York comedy clubs, too…and I guess he was more often found in them. Stand-up comedy was Lenny's secondary profession. Ask him what his main line of work was and he'd tell you — truthfully — "I teach socially-maladjusted students to drive." He also taught Physical Education in the New York School System. That was when he wasn't ripping off his clothes on stage and covering his body with yogurt.

I only saw him perform a few times and one thing I remember is that when he was on the bill, patrons asked not to have the good seats up front. Or if they were in them, they made a point of moving to a rear table just before Lenny came on. His reputation was that he was liable to do just about anything up there and much of it involved spraying food in every direction. Other comics would tell tales that began, "Did you hear what Lenny did on stage last night?" And then they'd tell some story that you couldn't believe had actually happened…

…until you recalled things he had done and then you'd think, "Well, if anyone would do that, it would be Lenny."

Letterman and Seinfeld talked about him in that video we've been discussing here. He wasn't the workingest comic of his day but he may have been the most-discussed among his peers. Among the things they'd say about him was that it was a shame that what it was that made him so special on a stage just plain didn't translate to television. I'm not sure Dave ever had him on his show but if he did, it wasn't more than once or twice.

(Letterman makes mention in the video of the time Lenny brought a midget up on stage. If you're not easily offended, a third or fourth-hand account of that alleged incident can be found a few paragraphs down on in the article on this page. Is it true? I dunno. I'm sure a lot of what was reported about him was in the Urban Legend category. Thanks to Alan Burnett for finding that link.)

He was pretty funny when I saw him at the Store in the late seventies and apparently, he continued to perform, closer to his day job, through the end of that century and well into this one. I'm not sure if he's still at it but it wouldn't surprise me. Almost nothing about Lenny would surprise me.

Here's eight-and-a-half minutes of things he did on TV, which is not the kind of stuff that made Lenny the envy of his peers…for sheer guts if nothing else. I'm not sure what videos, if any, exist of him in clubs — that's what you'd really want to see — but most of this is from the 1979 revival of Laugh-In, the one that didn't feature Rowan and Martin but did have Lenny, Robin Williams, Sergio Aragonés and others. Sergio performed and also did some animations, one of which is in here for a second. It's not the best example of Lenny being Lenny but there's some very funny stuff in it. Also, you'll want to watch this video just to hear Ed Sullivan say, "For those of you who've never seen a cockfight…"

Walter White writes…

Thanks for sharing that Seinfeld video. I've not kept up with the series, and would probably have missed it otherwise. That particular episode was filmed where I live, in New Milford, CT, and I can verify that things seem chronologically done.

They start off near what used to be the Marcus Dairy site next to the Danbury Fair Mall…a frequent site of car shows, as it appropriately turns out. They then travel north on 84/route 7 to New Milford — a 25 minute drive at most. Unless they drove over the same stretches again and again, I don't see that many takes of any dialogue. Once they hit the highway, it's a four-lane road until they reach the bridge that crosses the river into the "historic" section of New Milford, where they ended up going. One part that was missing from that stretch (very identifiable because it is new highway they had to cut mountains apart to pass through) ended up tacked onto the end of the piece. That's for the shots taken by the cameras mounted inside the car. It does seem like they've mixed and matched a bit on the exterior long shots.

For instance, a long shot shows them pulling from Main onto Bank Street, with dialogue…but then it's followed by an interior shot where they're speaking the dialogue, and they're just passing the town hall on Main Street, before that turn.

Watching it again, it does seem like they edited out silent spots for tempo, causing background to disappear that I'm expecting as the angles switch. But the background I see is always just a little further down the road…a matter of a hundred feet at most, not an entire retake of dialogue. It manages to add to that disjointed feel, almost as if a person was interrupting himself.

Anywho, I work in a photolab here and the day they arrived, I knew pretty quickly. People started coming in to print off snapshots they'd just taken of David and Jerry walking up and down Bank Street (where they park the car, and also the street that doubled for a town in Maine in Adam Sandler's Mr. Deeds.) We've tended to pride ourselves on giving people their space here (Dustin Hoffman always liked going to the Bank Street Theater, which Jerry and David walk past when they seem to be walking down a hill, because no one would bother him, even if they recognized him.) Still, I imagine it's hard to remain nonplussed when suddenly faced with Seinfeld and Letterman at the same time. That was filmed on April 19th. The local paper ran an article with photos you can see here.

I remember hoping they got the heck wherever they were going. We had a major front come through that night, which dropped temperatures about 15 degrees and caused power outages and some minor flooding here, hence all the grey clouds about in the background.

Thanks again for sharing that, and my best wishes for a speedy recovery.

I'm doing better today, thanks…and thanks for the info. I'm kinda curious how much they're spending on these videos, above and beyond whatever Jerry and his guests are getting. They're trying real hard to look simple but someone's putting serious coin and a helluva lot of work into them. Just planning locations, getting permissions, working out shooting plans…jeez, there's a lot of money and effort in capturing something like Jerry and Dave going out for coffee. I guess the money's all coming from Acura and I wonder if they think it's worth it, especially when half an episode is used to extol the glories of cars they don't make. But like I said, I like 'em a lot.

In other news: The fine artist-animator Mike Kazaleh thinks those Hanna-Barbera commercials were done in the late sixties with animation and posing by Art Babbitt, and Irv Spence worked on the Bardahl spot. Mike thinks the voice of the boss is Lennie Weinrib (he's right) and that the Frenchman is Alan Reed (yeah, probably). He likes my theory that the engine sputters were something Mel Blanc recorded for another project and they were used here.

I have not forgotten about the whole Ray Middleton mystery and will get back to it this week. I also hope to soon bring you our discussion of what exactly it is that people think Jay Leno did, in reclaiming The Tonight Show, that was so unethical. This bum knee of mine has thrown a lot of things off-schedule…

The Saturday morning of the very first San Diego Comic-Con in 1970, my friend Steve Sherman picked me up and we, along with Steve's brother Gary and our pal Bruce Simon, drove down to that historic gathering. I was in such a hurry when Steve pulled up outside at a very early hour that I didn't notice that my father's car was not in the driveway. It should have been…since he was still inside, fast asleep. When I returned home late that evening, I learned that some time the previous night, that car — an Oldsmobile with a whole lotta miles on it, I believe — had been stolen.

The police had come by and reports had been filled out. My father was annoyed, of course, more at the inconvenience than at the cost, most of which would be covered by insurance. But it was a pain to get to work the following week. His friend and co-worker Howard had to come by and give him a lift. And it was a pain to go out and shop for another car. His brother, my Uncle Nathan drove him to a couple of lots before he found the right one. And the big pain was that he'd lost his briefcase and a filebox of papers he had in the trunk — papers relating to cases he was then handling in his job for the Internal Revenue Service. All of that had to be reconstructed and replaced.

Around a month later, my father announced that he'd finally, after much struggle, re-created all the paperwork he'd lost. The next day, the police called to say they'd found the car…and all that paperwork.

The vehicle had turned up in Orange County in the yard of a company that bought old, undriveable cars for scrap. You towed one in with a pink slip. They gave you cash for it, no questions asked.

The Oldsmobile had been stripped and its seller did not have a set of keys for it. For some reason, that did not make the fellow at the automotive junk yard suspicious. What did was that the trunk had not been opened. The thieves either hadn't been able to get into it or hadn't bothered.

Someone at the yard pried it open, found all those I.R.S. papers inside and then either called the police who called the I.R.S. or called the I.R.S. who called the police. Detectives did their usual detecting and determined, of course, that the pink slip that had transferred ownership was a total forgery. What's more, they knew who had done it.

There was a crime boss in Orange County…and if I ever knew his name, I've forgotten it. Let's call him Hal Capone. He had a very lucrative, very crooked operation. Kids would steal cars. They'd take them to one of Mr. Capone's many lieutenants who would fork over quick cash for them. Then the car would disappear into some network that would strip it and sell the strippings here, and the carcass of the automobile there. The cops had had a fair amount of success in busting those lieutenants but they hadn't been able to connect it all to Hal Capone. They knew he ran everything but couldn't prove it in a court of law.

Several detectives came to our house and told my father: "We were able to track the phony pink slip to the guy who bought the car from the kids who stole it out of your driveway. He's new at this and we're not all that interested in him. We want to bust Capone." The lieutenant who'd bought and sold the Olds was willing to plea-bargain. In exchange for probation and no jail time, he was willing to turn State's Evidence against Hal Capone. That would surely make it possible to get a conviction against Capone but not much of one. Capone had no criminal record but did have the funds necessary to hire the best attorneys in the state.

A detective who I recall looking exactly like Norman Fell said, "He'll get six months in jail, tops. He might just get probation. This is a guy who has probably been responsible for the theft of thousands of cars in Southern California in the last ten or fifteen years and that's all he'll get." Then he leaned in closer to my father and said with a serious, dramatic tone, "With your cooperation, we think we can put Capone away for a long time. But it does mean you'll have to testify."

My father was not the bravest man in the world but he instantly said, "Yes, absolutely. Whatever I can do to help."

Hal Capone was arrested and charged with one count of receiving stolen property…or something like that. He scrambled expensive attorneys, they dickered with the prosecutors and a deal was struck. Capone would plead guilty and would serve two or three months in the most comfortable prison in Southern California. In exchange, the state would agree they would not prosecute him any further on this or any related matter.

The day his plea was entered before a judge and he was sentenced, my father went to the courtroom. This, he had to see. I wanted to go with him but I had a final exam at U.C.L.A. that afternoon.

In court, Capone stood and affirmed his guilty plea to the judge. He was sentenced to the two or three months and told that he could go but would have to report within sixty days to begin serving his sentence. As he walked out of the courtroom, Hal probably thought to himself what a crafty, shrewd operator he was. He'd made millions with a huge car theft ring and this was all the law could do to him: Toss him in a luxury hotel with bars on some windows for two or three months. "He had to be feeling pretty cocky," my father told me as he described what he saw that day.

Then a man in a dark suit walked up to Mr. Hal Capone, identified himself as a special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and placed him under arrest for stealing government documents.

What government documents? Why, the ones in the trunk of my father's car, of course.

Capone had never seen those documents. I don't think he'd even seen the car…but the documents had been stolen along with the rest of the Oldsmobile. And he couldn't very well deny he was a part of its theft and sale, having just pled guilty to that. The state had agreed there'd be no further prosecution of him on this matter but the Feds hadn't agreed to anything of the sort.

I'm a bit fuzzy on some of the details because very little of this ever made the news and all I know from here on is what my father told me and he was fuzzy on some of the details. But the way he described it, they charged the Godfather of Car Theft with crimes that could result in a long, long stay in a small, small room. High-priced lawyers were again scrambled, pleas were bargained and the end result was the dissolution of the entire operation, charges against many involved in it…and Hal Capone did a lot more than two or three months in prison. We later heard it was more like ten years, though he managed parole a few years shy of that. My father did not have to testify but the fact that he was willing and ready was apparently vital to any of this happening.

I told this tale to some lawyers a few years ago and they said, "There must be more to the story than that" because a few parts of it didn't make sense to them. That may well be and you needn't write to tell me that. I'm sure there was more to it than what I've reported here. The important part to me though was that my father was very, very proud of the role he'd played in bringing a very, very bad man to justice. And he really enjoyed describing the look on Hal Capone's face when he was arrested in the courthouse lobby and he suddenly realized that it wasn't over; that of all the stolen cars he'd trafficked in, it was the car of Bernie Evanier that had truly made a Federal Case out of things.

I can't embed it but I really enjoyed the recent episode of Jerry Seinfeld's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee with David Letterman. In some of these, you can tell that Mr. Seinfeld doesn't find some of the utterances of his guest all that funny, either because they aren't or because we're watching Take 8 of the same dialogue. Seinfeld is great at many things but faking laughter ain't one of them. The rapport in the Letterman episode, however, seems quite real and Dave is a lot funnier with people he likes than he is with about two-thirds of the guests he has on his show.

I'm kinda fascinated by these videos because it's obvious that a lot of money has gone into them as well as an awful lot of Jerry Seinfeld's time. Most produced-for-the-web shows look like they had two cameras and a crew of four. Comedians in Cars has, if anything, too many cameras. In the driving scenes, they have small video cameras mounted all over the vehicle — on the windshield, on the dashboard, etc. — and they cut between them fiercely, plus there are cars with cameraguys following and rolling alongside whatever dazzling auto contains Jerry and his guest. Some of this is quite visible at times, especially in the Sarah Silverman episode. In places, the backgrounds change between shots in mid-anecdote and it looks like Jerry and Sarah repeated some speeches over and over and then the editor cut together multiple takes…a lot of effort to try and achieve a flow of unedited spontaneity. But I still like most of 'em and the Dave one is especially good.

Charles McGrath offers up a really good profile of Woody Allen. Can you believe that Mr. Allen is 77? That he's about to release his 48th feature? Amazing.

Here are two commercials that Hanna-Barbera produced in the early sixties — one for Bardahl gas additive and one for Lion Gas. The voices in the Bardahl spot are Jerry Hausner, Gary Owens (as Bardahl himself) and at least one someone else. Nominations are welcome. The voices in the Lion Gas spot appear to be Henry Corden as the Frenchman and Shep Menken as the lion. The sputterings of the car engine sure sound like Mel Blanc but I find it hard to believe H-B would have paid Mel to come in and do them…and if you were paying Mel to come in, why not have him do one (or all) of the speaking voices? So maybe they lifted the sounds of him off some other track or maybe someone else did a great impression of Mel's automotive sounds. We report, you decide…

Let me preface this by saying I am well aware that (a) most people who come to this site care about few things less than they care about my knee problems and (b) I have a pretty minor medical concern compared to what some folks are enduring. But since I am getting a lot of e-mails asking how I'm doing and since it saves time to say it here rather than over and over in private messages…

I'm doing okay. I had the surgery on Monday and went in yesterday so the doctor who did it could inspect his handiwork. It's healing a lot slower than I'd hoped/expected and today, it's a hair worse than yesterday. But overall, I think it's moving in the right direction and I start Physical Therapy as soon as the Physical Therapist can wedge me into his schedule.

Basically, my knee just hurts. On a scale of one-to-ten with "ten" being having each of the Rockettes high-kick you, one by one in the crotch and "one" being watching Peter Lawford perform "The Age of Aquarius," I'm at about a four, occasionally trending to a five. But that's really only when I put any weight on it. Sitting here at the computer, I'm fine as long as I don't flex too rapidly. Going down stairs is like a six but doesn't last long. I have Norco but I refuse to take it until the Rockettes come by. I have taken a few doses of Ibuprofen or the generic version of Aleve. That's about the limit of my drug-taking and I'm not even all that comfy with that.

I'm sure it will get better. Right now, the big question is if it'll impair my Comic-Con International experience. I still intend to be there July 18-21 and to preside over 72,000 panels or however many they have me doing. I just don't expect to hike as many miles as I usually do and may even have to call upon the con's squadron of dedicated wheelchair-pushers to get me from hotel to convention center and back again to hotel. The goal is to not need that.

I keep thinking of the late Julius Schwartz, the great comic book editor who left us in 2004. Julie loved being at the Comic-Con and I'd thought nothing, but nothing could keep him away. Then in June of 2003, a month before that year's San Diego get-together, Julie called me. "I don't think I can make it to the con this year," he said. "I'm having too much trouble walking and that convention center is so big. Just to get anywhere…"

"So we'll put you in a wheelchair," I said. "The con has volunteers who love to push people around and wait on them."

"I don't want to be in a wheelchair," he proclaimed. "Old men are in wheelchairs."

I said, "Julie, you just turned 88. You are an old man! What are you waiting for? Your bicentennial?"

He laughed but spent the next ten minutes telling me it was undignified to be in a wheelchair. A wheelchair meant you were helpless. A wheelchair was unbecoming. A wheelchair made you seem like some feeble sick person, dependent on everyone around you. No, under no circumstances, would Julius "Living Legend" Schwartz appear at the convention in a wheelchair.

I said, "How about if we check out all the volunteers and get you the woman with the largest breasts to push you around?"

He thought a second and said, "That might work."

A month later, it worked in that it got him there. I saw Julie, I saw the wheelchair and I saw the woman with large breasts they'd selected to push the wheelchair…but I never actually saw Julie in the wheelchair. Several people, however, told me they saw him pushing the wheelchair and the large-breasted woman was seated in it.

That's my Saturday Afternoon Report. Tune into this space tomorrow for another Tale of My Father — the story of how he helped break up one of the largest car theft rings in Southern California. I'll be posting it tomorrow morning. That is, if my computer and I don't melt.  It's about 90° here…obviously the result of letting gay people marry.

A high percentage of the comic books I've written over the years were drawn by a wonderful, talented man named Dan Spiegle. I was a fan of his usually-anonymous work for Dell and Gold Key Comics for years and when a nice editor up there asked me if I'd like to write a script that Dan Spiegle would draw, he got a "Yes" that should be in the Guinness Book of World Records under "Quickest Reponse Time." I was utterly delighted with what Dan did with that script of mine…and utterly delighted with what he did with the next one and the next one and the next one…

I don't know how many comics we did together but I'll swear to you on a stack of all of them: I was never disappointed with one thing he drew and he was never even a day late with one of them. Once, his magnificent wife Marie phoned to tell me Dan had the flu or something and couldn't get out of bed so the next job might be a day or two tardy. I've worked with artists where you were lucky if they were only two weeks late. I told her to tell Dan to stay in bed, not to worry, take it easy, we had plenty of time to get this one to the printer. Naturally, it came in a day early…and naturally, every panel of it was up to his usual high standard.

I miss those days. Dan is 92 and largely retired. He and Marie have now been married 66 years. She putters in the garden while he does commissioned drawings for his many fans. That's one above at right. Dan drew the Hopalong Cassidy newspaper strip for a while and is often asked to draw ol' Hoppy for someone. Or Space Family Robinson. Or Blackhawk. Or Maverick. Or Korak, Son of Tarzan. Or Crossfire. Or Scooby Doo. Or any of the hundreds of other characters he's depicted so well over a long, distinguished career.

What you see at above left is the cover of Dan Spiegle: A Life in Comic Art. It's a new, must-get book by Dan and co-author John Coates. I wrote the foreword and Sergio Aragonés wrote the afterword but never mind us. Why you should get a copy is because of all the fine Spiegle art and the lengthy interview and articles about Dan's life and craft. I would recommend to you anything Dan ever did, regardless of whether I worked on it with him. But I would especially recommend this book because it'll help you understand how a true master of comic art thinks…and why I just plain love the guy. Here's an online preview and here's where you order.

Ted Healy was an actor-comedian who for a time worked with a trio of low-comedy sidekicks. He'd slap them and smack them and generally abuse them…and I dunno how the act played on vaudeville stages but when they did films, the sidekicks seemed to be the only funny thing about Mr. Healy. Later, they went off their own and were even funnier away from him. That's one of the two reasons everyone knows of The Three Stooges and very few people know of Ted Healy.

The other reason Healy isn't well-known today is that he died in 1937 at the age of just 41. How he died is one of those Hollywood Mysteries. Some accounts say he had a heart attack. Some say he was beaten to death by a group of "college boys" one night in the famed Sunset Strip nightclub, the Trocadero. Some say it wasn't college boys; that the assailants included actor Wallace Berry and also Albert R. Broccoli, who later produced the best James Bond movies. And there are other theories, some involving medical problems other than a heart attack.

For a time, Healy was more famous in Hollywood for dying under mysterious circumstances than he was for anything he did on the screen. None of these is conclusive but the gent behind the blog The Daily Mirror has collected "the story" as told in newspaper accounts at the time. Want to read it? Well, you can start with Part 1 then read Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14 and Part 15. In that order.

You may remember the three big Obama Scandals not so long ago…the ones that proved corruption beyond any doubt and would surely bring down Barack and result in certain impeachment. Remember those? Jonathan Chait says that they've been shown to be so baseless that top Republicans aren't even mentioning them any longer.

An early appearance on The Merv Griffin Show by the great handler of cards, Ricky Jay…

• Searched TV all day for someone talking sense. The closest was a little black girl who wants to turn her brother into a puppy.

I'm still kinda reeling from yesterday's Supreme Court decisions on Gay Marriage. So in a different way are the folks who've dedicated their lives (often, quite profitably) to stopping that. A lot of them are complaining about the Justices who effectively invalidated California's Proposition 8, thereby overruling "the will of the electorate." But as William Saletan notes, that's the electorate of years ago they're talking about. The electorate of California today would defeat a new Proposition 8 so soundly that no one will dare introduce one. Having lost a lot of elections lately, the forces who think they can stop Same-Sex Wedlock will presumably be wise enough not to initiate any votes anywhere unless they're really, really sure they can win by a landslide.

And again, we see Congressfolks and Senators calling for a Constitutional Amendment that will reverse some legal setback. We need to institute a tax: Every time a public figure calls for a new Constitutional Amendment and it goes nowhere, they have to pay the treasury a thousand dollars. We'd pay off the deficit in no time. (What is the actual precentage of such proposals that ever get as far as actual proposals? I'm guessing it's way under 1%.)

I'm pretty happy about this. No, the Supremes didn't make Gay Marriage the law of the entire land…but that gives many of those who oppose it the chance to slowly come around and accept. Not all of them will but enough. Give 'em time. Some of them are going to be pretty shocked that it doesn't destroy their own heterosexual marriages and bring the wrath of God down on the United States…though we can count on it being blamed for the next few tornados, earthquakes and Super Bowl outcomes.

What I'm wondering is how long a certain segment of the right will keep falling for apocalyptic predictions that don't come true. How many times does Pat Robertson have to be wrong about the earth being destroyed before people wonder if maybe, just maybe, that same God who assured him Mitt Romney would win big has these guys on his Do Not Call list?

In the past, I plugged the many theatrical productions of the Reprise Theatre Company here in Los Angeles. They did generally-marvelous short-term revivals of past Broadway musicals, working wonders with limited budgets and even-more-limited rehearsal schedules. I thought it was a great enterprise and I was proud to get involved with them, serving as "expert" for some of their Saturday lectures.

The main reason Reprise shows were so good is that top-notch people hired other top-notch people. The secondary reason may have been that they spent considerably more money on most of their productions than they took in. For a time, donations and fund-raisers managed to keep things afloat but the economy is what it is and costs are up and they had to abort their last season partway through and go on hiatus. Sad to say, it's become permanent: We who subscribed or worked with them all received e-mails the other day saying, basically, that they couldn't find a financial path to resuming…so no more Reprise.

That's a shame. I loved about 85% of everything I saw there, which is way above my appreciation level of all other shows I go see. The more I learned about how little time they had to prep, the more impressed I was. I often attended opening nights when you'd think there'd still be bugs and mistakes but I can't recall any more than I've seen in long-running Broadway hits. I'm going to miss those shows…a lot.

Have I ever mentioned here how much I like Audra McDonald's singing? She's just wonderful. If you aren't familiar with her work, click below and become an instant fan…