Monthly Archives: April 2017

Thought I Had Today About Donald Trump #1: He was interviewed on Face the Nation this morning by John Dickerson. Trump said that his new healthcare proposal contains a provision to protect people with pre-existing conditions. He said, "We've set up a pool for the pre-existing conditions so that the premiums can be allowed to fall."

Dickerson said there is no such item in the bill. Trump said it's in there. Dickerson said it isn't…and that conversation hit a dead end because Dickerson wasn't prepared to hand Trump a copy of it and say, "I say it isn't in there. If you want to prove that the press is inaccurate, here's your chance. Show me the paragraph!"

But of course, even that is a distraction. It would be very easy to put a provision into the bill that would set up high-risk pools for folks with pre-existing conditions if there are no restrictions on what insurance companies can charge them. The issue is to get these people affordable health care.

That's one of Trump's skills. Like a skilled sleight of hand magician, he makes you watch his left hand while the right hand is sneaking a potato under the middle cup.

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Thought I Had Today About Donald Trump #2: Trump opponents are aghast that even though Trump is not delivering on promises (or in some cases, is angling to achieve the opposite) and even though he gets caught in lie after lie, he hasn't lost much support among his base. But no one should be surprised about that.

You can't beat something with nothing and most people who are loyal to one guy aren't going to terminate that loyalty until they have someplace else to move it to. Right now, to not like Trump is to leave themselves with no leader, no hope of achieving what's on their wish list. They'll stick with The Donald until someone emerges who looks like he'll give them all the stuff Trump promised but (a) do a better job of delivering it and maybe also (b) not have as many of Trump's personal negatives, like his constant reversals of positions, his family business conflicts and other things that might lower his popularity and therefore his power.

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Thought I Had Today About Donald Trump #3: Many of his strongest supporters are counting on him to do two things in particular. One is to slap down immigrants and establish that America belongs to people — especially white people — who were born here.

They want the wall built, not so much because it will keep anybody out but because it will stand as a symbol that foreigners aren't terribly welcome…especially if, as seems increasingly unlikely, he can bully Mexicans into paying for it. It would be like making Mexico atone for there being so many Hispanics already in this country.

The other thing they really want is to see jobs come back to this country. This is something Trump is not going to be able to do and so far, his plan mainly seems to be about claiming successes over increases in employment that he had nothing to do with. What stops him from actually doing something is that Trump is also a guy who believes that if you run a business, no one — but no one — should force you to do anything that might lower your profits.

If as has been reported, Ivanka's clothing line is made in China by people who work 60 hour weeks and are paid a pittance…well, that's it. Trump's never going to force a company to go where the workers have to be paid more.

Just as the coal industry is never going to be what it once was. Even leaving environmental concerns aside, other sources of energy are now cheaper…which is why they aren't going to be burning a whole lot of coal to heat Mar-a-Lago. This article will tell you more about why the promise to bring back jobs in the coal industry is like promising to open new Betamax factories or to get more people to use Western Union to send telegrams instead of e-mail.

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This has been Three Thoughts I Had Today About Donald Trump. There was actually a fourth but it involved him actually trying to work with Democrats instead of just trying to bully them into giving him everything he wants. So it's not likely to happen.

I just watched the speech/act Hasan Minhaj performed at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and I've embedded a video of it below. I'm sure a lot of folks wouldn't like it but I thought it was a gutsy, on-point effort that went over about as well as anything could in that room. He was not nice to a lot of those in the audience and even not-nicer to that Chief Exec who was conspicuous in his absence. But he had some really sharp, clever lines.

That is a very tough gig, maybe the toughest in all of comedy. Those who turn out to dinner and mingle are there to shmooze and be seen, not to be the target of barbs from the rostrum. It's also a situation where the performer has to go out in front of the world with material that is wholly untested on the intended sort of audience. I mean, it's not like there's a comedy club somewhere in which one can "break it in"before a similar assemblage and filter out the lines that get tepid responses.

Minhaj is a brave man with (mostly) strong material. A few times, you could see on this face that he was thinking "Wish I'd cut that last one" but he kept soldiering on and most of it paid off. I won't quote any of his best lines because many of you will now be clicking and watching.

Well, I'll quote one: At the outset, he said "Welcome to the series finale of the White House Correspondents' Dinner" and I thought to myself, "Oh, I hope so." I've always found these to be phony affairs with reporters and journalists rubbing elbows with the President — whoever it is at the moment — instead of holding his feet to the fire. What I saw of the dinner before Minhaj got to the microphone made me wonder if everything wrong with this event can't be solved merely by having the president not be there.

Take him and his loyal staff out of the equation and it's a very different event. Suddenly, the reporters are the most important ones in the hall and you don't have as much phony, feigned respect on the premises. So now I'm thinking that the greatest achievements of Trump's first 100 days is that he may have shown the White House Correspondents Association how to do these events right: Don't invite the guy in the Oval Office.

It's not much but it's something. Here's the speech…

In 1996, Nathan Lane starred in a Broadway revival of my favorite musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I wrote about it here some years ago…

I saw Nathan Lane twice. Both times, I imposed on Larry Gelbart to get me house seats. As co-author of the play, Mr. Gelbart got damn good house seats but the first time I had his, I made a fatal error. I didn't pick up the tickets well before the performance so they gave them away (or sold them, perhaps via a scalper for megabucks) to someone else. When my date and I arrived at the theater that night, they instead stuck us in the back row of the St. James which was literally too narrow for someone 6'3" to sit in without having his knees up under his chin. I ended up sitting on the seat with the seat up, if you can figure out what I mean by that. I could not sit in the seat with the seat down. From there, Nathan Lane was about the size of a Jujubee.

This was a late preview and Gelbart, who would not see this production until weeks later, asked me to e-mail him immediately after the performance and give him my opinion. Out on the sidewalk afterwards, I used my cell phone to send him a three word review: NEEDS MORE JEWS. When Larry finally saw it, he called to tell me he agreed but said, "They'll grow into it."

He was, as he usually was in matters of comedy, correct. About eight months later, I was back in New York. Once again, I arranged for Mr. Gelbart's house seats but this time I was wiser. I scheduled Forum for my last night in Manhattan and picked the tickets up on my first day there. This time, my date and I (different date) were in the second row on the aisle. World of difference. Nathan Lane and the company had had many months to explore the play and learn how to get laughs with the material and they were much, much better even though insofar as I could tell, no Jews had been added.

And here, we have two clips from that production, one from the opening number, "Comedy Tonight," one from the reprise of it at the end. plus (after a pause you'll have to wait through) some video of the cast taking its bows. This was a great show even if it didn't top the production I saw with Phil Silvers in the lead…

Donald Trump has proposed a huge tax cut for the rich. As Jonathan Chait notes, Conservative and Republican pundits are expressing outrage that sources like the New York Times are describing this huge tax cut for the rich as — can you believe it? — a huge tax cut for the rich. Apparently, this is all part of the new Trump argument that any news that isn't written the way you want it to be written is "fake news."

Robert Givens was born in 1918, which makes him 99 years old. He graduated high school in 1936 and two years later, went to work for Walt Disney as an artist. That was in time to work on many of the classic Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck cartoons and on a film you may have heard of called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

Two years later, he moved over to Leon Schlesinger's studio to work on what we now think of as Warner Brothers cartoons. One of his first jobs there was to redesign a rabbit character they'd been fooling around with and also a hunter character for the film A Wild Hare. That cartoon is considered by many to be the first and archetype appearances of Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, and most of what Mr. Givens did would survive subsequent refinements of those characters.

He worked for Schlesinger and the subsequent Warner Brothers studio for years after, not as an animator but as a layout artist and character designer, and he occasionally contributed so much to a cartoon that they gave him story credit. He left for a time to serve in World War II and to work on training films and for RKO, then left again to work for UPA for years on all of its cartoons, including Mister Magoo. Later, he worked for Hanna-Barbera, DePatie-Freleng, Filmation. MGM, whatever studio Chuck Jones was directing for at the time and even for Film Roman on Bobby's World and the first four seasons of Garfield and Friends.

This is a very partial rundown of the man's career. He also did hundreds of jobs for Western Publishing drawing Dell and Gold Key comic books (mainly of Disney properties) and children's books. His last professional credit was the 2001 feature, Timber Wolf, directed by Chuck Jones. About the time Chuck died the following year, Bob retired from drawing, though he did some teaching…and you may be wondering what he's doing these days.

Well, today he was out at the Disney lot in Burbank and at lunchtime, artists from all over that lot assembled in an auditorium to hear him field questions from four animation experts — or maybe it was three animation experts plus me. That's us in the photo above. Standing are the Marks: At left is Mark Kausler and at right is Yours Truly, poorly-lit. That's Bob in the center and on the left is Jerry Beck and at right is Leonard Maltin. And we were also honored by the presence in the room of Friz Freleng's daughters, Sybil and Hope, who recalled how fond their father was of Bob.

We screened A Wild Hare and then peppered Bob with questions for an hour or so, then we retired to a private dining room for lunch. There, Bob didn't get much to eat because we continued to fire questions at him. Even at his age, he's still sharp, he still remembers plenty…and since he worked with everyone, there was no let-up in the interrogation. I asked him a lot about his time at UPA, like what he remembered about the Dick Tracy cartoons ("Cheapest thing we ever did") and how drunk Jim Backus was in Magoo recording sessions ("Sometimes, very").

Bob's been interviewed many times before. Here's one and here's one and here's one and there are many others online. I dunno if the one we did will wind up online or if it'll disappear forever into the Disney Studio Library but a lot of new animators and artists were sure thrilled to be there and meet this man and hear what he had to say. So was I.

We're finishing the sad task of emptying Carolyn's apartments. She had two of them and also two Public Storage lockers…and while we were at it, we moved everything out of my Public Storage locker. I am here using the term "Public Storage" in its non-generic state, denoting the actual company by that name. I am not fond of that company at the moment.

For decades, I had a big unit — gosh, that sounds sexual — in one of their eight zillion facilities. It was on the ground floor of one wing of a huge building which is supposed to have guards, alarms, security cameras, impenetrable doors and secret access codes. Sometime between late Saturday night, April 8 and the following morning, it apparently only had a few of those things. One or more people (probably more) armed with axes broke into that wing and hacked into about fifty lockers, mine included.

The doors there are not metal. They have great, strong locks but what good is a great, strong lock when you can break into the door and literally chop the lock out? Each cubicle was ransacked. Neatly-stacked rows of boxes in mine were toppled and the contents emptied and strewn about. We re-boxed but I'm still trying to figure out what ain't there no more. If someone tries to sell you some old, mint-condition copies of Groo the Wanderer or any of my books and they're carrying an ax, you'll know where they got them.

My unhappiness with the company flows from their total disinterest in the whole matter. It pretty much comes down to "Talk to your insurance man and don't bother us." (I talked to my insurance man, who's actually an insurance lady. Turns out my homeowner's policy does cover this theft and they're figuring out if it covers the labor involved in paying others to re-box and rearrange. But either way, there is this $1,000 deductible…)

When pressed further by me, the manager of the storage facility insisted she had no power to do anything…which I believe. She told me to call Customer Service — which I did — and guess what! I got another person with no power to do anything.

When I insisted on knowing who in the company could actually do something, he said I'd have to talk to a Division Supervisor. I've left a couple of messages which are so far unreturned and I suspect always will be. Either that or they'll tell me they have no power to do anything.

Which is why this tenant of 30+ years has upped and moved his re-boxed boxes to a storage facility operated by another company…something I should have done years ago. It's cheaper, nicer, better-lit, cleaner, more secure, nearer to me and operated by people you can actually talk to and who will at least try to make things right. There, one does not find the disturbing trend in business these days to try and set things up such that if you have a complaint, too friggin' bad.

There's an e-mail address and maybe a phone number which asks you to leave a message and someone will get back to you…and then (of course) no one gets back to you. Or if by some chance they do, they either don't know anything or aren't empowered to do anything about it. This has been my problem every time I've flown United Airlines in the last decade or so. Something goes wrong…and it isn't that which irks me. It's that I can't get to anyone with the authority to do more than apologize to me on behalf of the company. They've set it up so no time or money has to be squandered fixing problems or (gasp!) granting refunds.

In an odd way, I almost don't blame companies that do this because we are way too tolerant of it when we can get a bargain. When United had that recent messiness with a passenger who was dragged off a flight and injured, a whole lot of folks were infuriated and said, "I'll never fly United again!" And this is a vow that most of them will keep until they have to go somewhere and United has the flight that's cheapest and/or most convenient. Then they'll say, "Well, when you get right down to it, all the airlines are the same." I am happy to say I've found that all storage facilities are not the same.

In a few days, I may write something here about what it's like to clean out the apartments and storage lockers of a departed loved one like I have this past week. If there's a human emotion I haven't experienced during the process, I can't think what it might be. Indifference, perhaps.

Bette Midler has made a huge splash in the Broadway revival of Hello, Dolly! but let's watch a couple of clips of the lady who originated the role.  Here's Carol Channing in some footage shot during her 1983 revival tour.  I think I saw this production and I remember thinking the songs were great, Carol was great and the storyline — especially the plot about the two silly ribbon clerks — didn't interest me in the slightest. Still, it was worth the price of admission for numbers like these…

If Donald Trump has done nothing, he's convinced me that almost no one these days stands on principle…or, at best, one. That's the principle that says that if our side does it, it's great and perfect and honorable and even legal…and when the other side does it, it's evil and incompetent and dishonest and they should be behind bars.

And even when you can't spin it as a capital crime or a screw-up that's going to harm or kill millions, you at least spin it as an example of sheer wrongheadedness. Barack Obama was insensitive and lazy to spend so much time playing golf, which he did once in his first hundred days. Trump is such a fine executive that he got everything done — brilliantly, his fans might add — and has had time to hit the links between 13 and 16 times so far, depending on which source you believe.

Sigh. It's like that for everything these days. Here are some links of the non-golfing variety…

• Trump keeps signing executive orders and seeing them overturned by judges. This, of course, prompts him to throw tantrums about the judges being crooked or biased or something and to threaten to use the power of the presidency to stop these outta-control men and women who somehow think they have the power to enforce laws that Trump doesn't like. Dahlia Lithwick explains that before Trump screams that the game is rigged, he oughta try learning how it's played.
• Trump's greatest strength, some said, was his skill as a great negotiator. Seth Stevenson runs down the list of botched negotiations of his first hundred days. And many pundits are now suggesting that it isn't that Trump's bargaining skills in his private business don't apply to the presidency. It's that his bargaining skills in his private business were never very good even there.
• Jonathan Chait on how the Trump Administration is trying to sell its tax cut that would mainly benefit people like Donald Trump. It involves changing the subject any time anyone asks about how it would mainly benefit people like Donald Trump.
• Frank Rich says Trump's triumph-free first hundred days are a triumph for America. Yeah, but he's got 1,360 more to do damage.
• Daniel Larison on yet another way the Trump Administration is being ineffectual: Not properly staffing the State Department.
• And the food industry is counting on the Trump Administration to do away with all those silly rules that force them to tell us what's in the food they sell us. I understand why this would be a good thing for the companies that sell not-the-healthiest food but I have yet to hear even a bogus explanation of why this would be good for us.

I probably won't watch the White House Correspondents Dinner this weekend, though I assume the remarks of featured comedian Hasan Minhaj will be quite available online. Wonder how many people turned it down before they went to him. I will be watching Samantha Bee's competing show…and I think it's a shame they didn't get her.

You are perhaps familiar with Plan 9 From Outer Space, the 1959 "so bad it's good" science-fiction movie written, produced, directed, and edited by Ed Wood. The film starred Gregory Walcott, Mona McKinnon, Tor Johnson, Vampira and some posthumous silent footage of Bela Lugosi, who otherwise wouldn't have been caught dead in a movie like that. I'm not a particular fan of the flick and I'm not sure I've made ever made it all the way through, which I suspect puts me with the majority of those who've tried to watch it.

Still, a few nights ago, I did enjoy — greatly — a live, staged reading of the screenplay done under the auspices of the fine comedian, Dana Gould. At least, he seemed to be in charge. There was no program book, and the poster didn't say who produced, directed, adapted or any of that but he's helmed other performances with many of the same cast members. This particular ensemble included Mr. Gould plus Bobcat Goldthwait, David Koechner, Paul F. Tompkins, Ron Lynch, Jonah Ray, Janet Varney, Matt Braunger, Pam Severns, G. Charles Wright, Deborah Baker, Jr. and Nate Mooney, and there was music by Eban Schletter and puppetry and effects by Pam Severns.

The "puppetry and effects" consisted of manipulating cutouts and transparencies on an overhead projector, thereby maintaining the proper budgetary aspect of the original. The music was underscore and sound effects, and Mr. Schletter got the proceedings off to a grand start with a dynamite overture played mainly on a Theremin. You don't hear a lot of good Theremin music these days.

The reading was very funny, in some cases just because they read the lines as written, in some cases because of way-over-the-top theatrics, and in some cases because of snide comments injected into the stage directions. The performances were all excellent and if you forced me to pick a standout, I'd say Paul F. Tomkins as Eros, the alien commander who institutes Plan 9, which involves waking Earth's dead. It was especially odd to see Bobcat Goldthwait inherit the role written for and originally performed by Tor Johnson.

I liked that the whole reading was done with a certain respect 'n' affection for the source material. It would have been easy to slip into a kind of snotty contempt for it but that, they did not do. The audience howled with laughter throughout the proceedings but — I always seem to have to throw a "but" into these things — doing the entire script made for a long presentation and you could sense the loss of energy in the last twenty-or-so minutes. I am not suggesting they trim it because then they wouldn't be as faithful to the movie. I'm just saying it went on a little long.

Word is that Mr. Gould will be mounting productions in other theaters in other towns. If one is anywhere near you, I recommend you get tickets. Unlike the film on which it is based, this is not "so bad it's good." It's just plain good.

Here is a real obit for our friend Chris Bearde.

I have been up most of the night writing something about some stupid barbarian who eats cheese dip and today, I have to return to my main line of work these days: Closing out the apartment of my friend Carolyn before the month is out and rent is due. So you won't see much of me on this page during the next twenty-four hours. Who knows? I may even get some sleep.

Hey, if you want to read something important, read Fred Kaplan on why war with North Korea is not likely unless the Trump Administration does something really, really stupid. I get the feeling that even people who love what he is doing in this country — assuming he ever gets around to actually doing it — aren't all that confident of his ability to handle foreign affairs.

And Jordan Weissmann explains why Donald Trump's plan to massively cut taxes for Donald Trump (and others who don't need it) will never make it through Congress.

I'll be back soon, perhaps having slept.

I never knew so much work went into getting rice from the field to my table. I thought it just magically appeared in Chinese restaurants…

As we zero in on Trump's 100th day, we see that his rep as The Great Deal Maker is in serious jeopardy, especially if he keeps proving unable to make a deal. I don't know that it works well in the private sector but it sure doesn't seem to work in the public one to wait for the opposition to come crawling to you. Here are some links of interest about what's going on with him and his dysfunctional administration…

• Matt Yglesias discusses the disproportionate attention given to "Trump voters" — but first we have to define that term. And don't expect these people to all abandon The Donald as they realize he's not that competent and not even that interested in giving them what he promised. The key to defeating him in 2020 is to unite the opposition between one candidate…preferably someone more charismatic than Hillary.
• Here's another Jonathan Chait piece. This one is about how in a desperate attempt to appear to be accomplishing things, Trump is now signing a flurry of executive orders that don't do much.
• Margaret Hartmann reports that Trump's plan to build the most fantastic, wonderful wall in the world — the wall that will save us from the Scary Immigrants who actually aren't really coming here much anymore — ain't going anywhere. I get the feeling that before long, Trump will erect a couple of handball courts on the border and insist those are the walls he promised to build.
• And Fred Kaplan comments on Trump's insistence that he's expanding the military. Fred's comment is that Trump may well do that but hasn't done it yet.

It's interesting to hear that Trump won't get rid of Sean Spicer because he thinks Spicer gets good ratings. Spicer doesn't but you know who does? TV hosts who make jokes about Trump being a moron. That's yuge these days.

We've all heard that Obamacare is or was deeply unpopular with Americans. I don't think so. Its negative numbers always included a sizeable number of people whose opposition to it was because it didn't go far enough, didn't provide enough coverage. They were not people who wanted the government to keep its damned nose out of health care but rather people who wanted Single-Payer or something in that area.

Also, a lot of folks who said they opposed it did want government to enforce something that would lower health costs and make it affordable for all. They just didn't trust Democrats to come up with the best possible plan and bought into the idea that Republicans could do better. Now, they're realizing that the Republicans not only can't do better but don't want to. For all the blather about "a better way," the G.O.P. leadership now seems divided into two groups: Those who want to get rid of all health care plans that help poor people…and those who want to get rid of all health care plans that help poor people but are afraid of how many voters they'd piss off so they want there to be something.

I also suspect that a lot of those who opposed Obamacare opposed Obamacare simply because they opposed Obama. With him out of power, there's less eagerness to wipe out anything he did just because he did it.

As Jonathan Chait notes, a new major poll shows that by overwhelming margins, America wants Obamacare to remain and for government to work at making it better. That's probably what's going to happen, though there may still be a few stubborn attempts to kill it because some politicians have been so hysterical in their opposition and can't move off that position so easily. Also, Trump seems to think he can hold it hostage to get concessions out of Democrats and he's probably wrong.

How long before Republicans turn their goals to (a) just limiting how much rich folks are taxed to pay for this and (b) selling the spin that the Affordable Care Act was always a doomed-to-fail plan and we should stop calling it "Obamacare" and instead call it something that makes it clear Republicans fixed it and made it work?

I should've realized I couldn't take the rest of the day off from this blog with this looming…

96.3% of voting members in the Writers Guild of America have authorized a strike to be called against companies that produce motion pictures and television. 6,310 ballots were cast and 67.5% of eligible WGA members voted.

That's a very impressive vote. You may remember that I said…

I am sure they will get that authorization but the magnitude will be critical. If it's by 51% or even 70%, the Producers will figure that the Guild is weak and divided and that a lousy offer will be accepted. They'll assume that even if we do go on strike, it won't last long. If the vote is 90% or over…well, that might make them think a bad offer won't be cost-effective. (The vote will not be 100% or even a few points shy of that because some of those voting will be writer-producers or writer-directors and some of those folks vote in what they see as the best interests of their non-writer functions.)

96.3% is about the highest number I could have imagined. And the 67.5% is just as impressive in a guild where a lot of members never vote for anything. I hope it will get some more realistic offers on the table. It should but in an era where some CEOs seem to value stubbornness over common sense, you never know.