Monthly Archives: May 2014

On my way to see this. I never have and I figure it's about time…

After 78 years, World Book and News — the biggest newsstand in Hollywood and one of the biggest anywhere — is closing. I guess I'm not surprised but I have to note how many comic books (among other publications) were sold there. It was a place that carried everything. You could find outta-town newspapers. You could find magazines that no other business carried. You could just hang out there and browse all day, every day, 24 hours a day.

It was located on Cahuenga just south of Hollywood Boulevard. On its right was an alley that some of us learned to park in when we went there. One day, someone pointed out to me that in the Buster Keaton movie, Cops, you can see Buster run out of that alley. I don't know why but since I learned that, it made the newsstand even more special to me. But not special enough that I shopped there in the last twenty years or so; not since the Internet became what it is. I guess that's why it's closing.

George Freeman points me to a post on David Thorne's site which I read before elsewhere and may even have linked to. It's this one in which Mr. Thorne engages in an e-mail joust with one of those folks I call an Unfinanced Entrepreneur — a person who wants to finance his business venture by getting you to work for free. Very funny, very relevant.

By the way, I do not believe all of the e-mail exchanges on Thorne's site are true. I suspect he has invented some or all of the people with whom he is arguing. But his debates sure are entertaining.

From Your Show of Shows: Sid Caesar goes to lunch. Carl Reiner and Howie Morris are two of the waiters…

Until a few minutes ago, I was unfamiliar with author David Thorne…but I'm going to visit his website often to read his wonderful writings and correspondence like this.

CBS, which distributes The Arsenio Hall Show, has changed its mind. It previously renewed the talk show for a second season and now says nope, there won't be one. In fact, if I understand correctly, Hall isn't even going to get to do a final episode. The last one he taped was, they thought at the time, the last one of Season One and that they'd be back soon doing Season Two.

Hall was averaging about one million viewers a night compared to about 3.5 million for Jimmy Fallon and around 2.7 million each for David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel. Conan O'Brien is drawing fewer viewers than Arsenio but TBS, which airs Conan, is happy enough with the demographics that they've renewed the show through 2018.

Since we're talking numbers here, by the way, here's an interesting fact. Craig Ferguson is leaving his show and lately, Seth Meyers has had about a 16% advantage on him in the ratings. That sounds like a lot but Fallon is beating Letterman by 31% and Kimmel by 35%. That's in total viewers. Meyers is doing a lot better than Ferguson in just the 18-49 age bracket. And Kimmel is doing a lot better than Letterman with that group, as well.

My former partner Dennis Palumbo writes about how a writer should deal with getting "notes" on his or her script. Folks who give notes should read this especially. Some of them can be very callous and insensitive to the time and emotion that the writer has in the work being critiqued.

As I think back over times when I've had real problems with notes, they fall into three categories. One is when you get multiple notes. The network wants your script to have more action and the producer wants less and the star wants something else. It is sometimes easier to deal with one set of notes from an idiot than three from smart people.

The second category is with notes that are mainly to assert power; where the note-giver is trying to interfere so he or she can say, "I fixed it and made it work" or the note-giver is just trying to prove he or she has the power to make the writers jump. I worked on a special one time where one of the stars wanted all his lines rewritten. He had no specific complaints about any of them. It was just to remind everyone that he was a star. He made a lot of gratuitous, pointless demands of everyone just to demonstrate that they had to obey.

When one of the other stars saw that the first star had been able to order a whole new set of lines, guess what the second guy wanted — and again, he had no particular complaints about what he already had. (He had previously had his agent raise hell because his dressing room was about three square feet smaller than the other star's. It was also much nicer and more conveniently located but that didn't count. Size matters.)

So the other writers and I wound up rewriting both stars' dialogue. What neither one realized, of course, is that what they got the second time around was for the most part, our second choices, written in a few hours. What they'd rejected out of hand was our first choices, written over a few weeks. Fortunately, some lines from the first set miraculously reappeared during the last rehearsals.

Finally, we have the third category: Notes that are given out of panic. These are notes that are given with no real thought of improving the script, just about pleasing one person.

About twenty years ago, I was hired by a very Nervous Producer to write an outline for a proposed animated feature. He had been charged with developing this outline and getting it to the point where he could hand it in to His Boss. His Boss would then decide if the project went on to the next step or if they would drop it and just write off as a loss what they had invested in outlines by folks like me.

I was not the first to tackle this particular project and they already had spent a lot of cash on outlines that the Nervous Producer didn't think were solid enough to present to His Boss. The Nervous Producer had convinced himself that he would be fired and his career in Hollywood would be over and he would lose his home and his family would no longer love him (etc.) if His Boss didn't love what he turned in.

He was hiring writer after writer to rewrite the outline. I was at least the fourth, maybe the fifth or sixth. This was his way of delaying that possible, dreaded moment when His Boss read and didn't love what had been developed. But of course, the more writers he hired, the more of the studio's money he spent so the loss if the project was abandoned became greater and greater…which, natch, made him more nervous.

The notes I got from him were never about making the story better or laying the structure for the best possible movie. They were more like…

• "My Boss said yesterday that he really liked this scene in another script where the characters went fly-fishing. You have to add a scene into your outline where the characters go fly-fishing."
• "Someone told me My Boss was saying he thought there was going to be a resurgence of movies about the Old West. Can we switch this thing around and set it in the Old West?"
• "My Boss mentioned in a meeting that he wanted to find something so the studio could work with Cher. Could we change the character of Harold to a woman so Cher could play that part?"
• "My Boss went to see Forrest Gump and loved it. I want to insert a character or change one to be more like Forrest Gump."

Needless to say, the story in question had no reason for anyone to go fly-fishing, could not have occurred in the Old West, Harold had to be male, there was no place for Forrest Gump, etc. I also recall him noting that His Boss wore a lot of plaid and asking me to specify in the outline that the hero dressed in plaid. I asked, "Do you want me to put him in a kilt?"

I rewrote the outline and then rewrote the rewrites to the point where I finally had to say to the Nervous Producer, "I've done more revisions on this than my contract called for. This is the Sixth Draft. If you want more, you're going to have to pay me more."

This horrified him. He couldn't pay me any more, he said. But if the outline wasn't still in active development, he had no choice but to turn it in. And then…and then…what if His Boss didn't love it? He asked me, "What do you think I should do?" I told him to hand in the Second Draft, which was much better than those that followed, but he didn't like that idea.

I went home and never heard from him again. A few weeks later, Hollywood Reporter announced that he was leaving the studio to spend more time with his family and pursue new projects. That, of course, is code for "Got fired." As far as I know, he never worked in the industry again.

Six months later, his replacement called me in to discuss a different project. When I inquired about the first one, she checked the files and found out that her predecessor had never handed anything in; not my outline, not the outlines by all who had gone before me. "I think that's why they got rid of him," she said. "He never finished developing anything."

That annoyed me a bit. If he wasn't going to hand anything in, he could have just not handed in my First Draft and saved us both a lot of time.

Jim Davis draws his cat…

Fred Kaplan parses a speech that President Obama gave recently at West Point, laying out a philosophy that not every foreign policy problem has a military solution. I would like to believe that's so…and recent history would seem to prove it is.

I am old enough to remember when this country's Anti-War Movement was all about how military action was immoral. Not that much of it isn't in many ways but I now see an Anti-War Movement that has a different premise: That most military action does not achieve its goals and leaves us worse off.

So here's my question: How many wars would this country currently be fighting if John McCain had been elected president?

You all know Tom Richmond as the current star caricaturist of MAD Magazine but he has an honor almost as prestigious. He's the President of the National Cartoonists Society and last weekend, he presided over the group's annual get-together. Here's his wrap-up on the festivities. I missed Day One and didn't participate in Day Three but if the other two were anything like Day Two, a good time was had by all.

Dick Van Dyke dancing in a store.

So I just got a call from a woman with a thick Asian accent who was reading from a script with roughly the same natural rhythm as the lady on my G.P.S. She said she was with Microsoft Support and they had received numerous reports that my computer was infected with a virus and that its contents were being downloaded all over the world. She offered to help me run a free test if I was at my computer.

I said, "That's a lie and this is a scam and you should be ashamed of yourself." She said, "I will never call you again" and she hung up.

Earlier in the day, I got a call from another fellow who was with a contracting company or at least cold-calling on their behalf… Here's how that one went, complete with one of the greatest mispronunciations I've heard in a lifetime of hearing my name mispronounced…

HIM: Mr. Avenire, I'm with So-and-So Home Improvements. You spoke with me six months ago and said you weren't quite ready to have work done on your house and to call you back about now. Are you ready now? We have estimators in your area who will be glad to come by and give you the lowest bid you'll get on this work.

ME: You're lying to me. We did not speak six months ago.

HIM: Well, I have it right here in my notes. I spoke to the homeowner.

ME: I'm the homeowner.

HIM: Well, I think I spoke to your wife.

ME: I don't have a wife.

HIM: Well, maybe it was your girl friend.

ME: No, oddly enough, we were talking about this last night and she specifically said she'd never spoken to anyone from So-and-So Home Improvement and that if you ever called and said she had, you were lying.

HIM: Oh. Well, look. How about if you tell me what kind of work you want to have done on your home and I'll get our estimator out there to give you the best possible price?

ME: Why would I want to do business with someone who'd just lied to me like that?

HIM: Well, okay, maybe I lied a little but the estimator…he's an honest guy.

You know, I'm starting to enjoy this…a little.

Here's a nice little magic trick but to do it, you have to have a guy in a bear suit…

I just set my TiVo to record a show that's on Spike TV tonight entitled One Night Only: An All-Star Comedy Tribute to Don Rickles. It features David Letterman, Jerry Seinfeld, Robert DeNiro, Jon Stewart and more.

What I don't get is the "One Night Only" part since it airs tonight, Friday and Monday on Spike TV, Friday on TV Land and Tuesday on Comedy Central. Oh, well. I hope someone drops their pants and fires a rocket.

Every third sentence that emanates from the mouth of Senator Mitch McConnell these days is a blood oath to repeal Obamacare. I don't believe he can do it and I don't believe he thinks he can do it. I just think it's something he has to say to turn out Republican votes for his re-election in Kentucky.

Kentucky has set up a health insurance exchange called Kynect which is quite popular in that state. A lot of folks who like it don't get that it's part of the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Remember that alleged protest sign, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare"? This is the same kind of logical disconnect. It's like saying, "I wish they'd close all the McDonald's. I don't care about any of those fast food chains, just as long as I can get my Big Macs and Egg McMuffins." (You can probably come up with a better analogy than that…)

So there's Senator McConnell's problem: How to vow to close McDonald's without taking away his constituents' Egg McMuffins. So far, he's handled the Obamacare/Kynect situation by denying they're the same thing and claiming that you can have one without the other. The Lexington Herald-Leader, which is a pretty big newspaper in his home state, is saying this is double-talk.

I don't think Mitch McConnell can lose in Kentucky unless he does one or both of two things. One is to suggest that anyone should ever be denied the purchase of any gun they want. The other is to say Obamacare might have some redeeming features. So from now 'til Election Day, he's going to have to continue to pretend to do away with Obamacare while not harming Kynect. This is going to be fun to watch.