Monthly Archives: July 2018

You've seen the work of my pal Lee Aronsohn on a number of successful TV shows including Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory. A while back over lunch, he told me about a new project he had — a documentary of a musical group he followed in the early seventies. You never heard of the band because they never made it, never even had an album. But they were popular at and around his alma mater — the University of Colorado in Boulder. They were called Magic Music.

Haunted by their music for decades after and curious about whatever happened to them, Lee set out to track 'em down, find out and maybe even get the band together again. The result is a documentary called 40 Years in the Making: The Magic Music Movie and it's won many, many awards in film festivals. It's opening this weekend in New York and the following weekend in Los Angeles and so on and so on in other cities.

Lee gave me a preview and I really liked it…a lot. A story about a group that hit the big time would not be without interest but this tale of a band that never quite went the distance is somehow more intriguing. I'm about the same age as Lee and like him, grew up in the turmoil of the sixties and Vietnam and Nixon and a lot of fumbling-about to find one's values and to reconcile them with finding a place in the world. Every one of my friends had to weigh living for the present against living for the future and we often struggled with being what your heart told you you should be versus your brain telling you what you could be.

So the film's about all that and it's also about Lee trying to reunite the guys and get their story told…and I guess also to make sure their unreleased tracks finally, a half century later, got released. If any of this sounds even vaguely interesting to you, check it out. You can find out where it's opening near you and learn more about it on this page. You can also watch the trailer there or — to save you a click — you can watch it below…

There seems to be no particularly vigorous denial out there that Les Moonves of CBS didn't do all or most of the abusive things he's been accused of doing. He's admitted it — perhaps not as explicitly as some might like but you have to figure he has lawyers advising him on how not to make things any worse for himself than they already are. The controversy now seems to be about what should happen to the guy.

CBS Corporate is engaging experts and more lawyers to determine the scope of his wrongdoing. It probably extends beyond the actions laid out in the Ronan Farrow article but how far? That may lead to the answer to the bigger question of What now? When a Louis C.K. or Jeffrey Tambor is disappeared, it impacts one show or one company or one small cranny of show business. Moonves was one of the most powerful people in television. Having given Moonves all that power, CBS has a duty to police the improper ways he abused it but they also have a duty not to nuke their own company and in the process hurt others.

What should they do? Beats the heck outta me.

This is not a perfect analogy but it's worth bringing up: Some years ago, I had a wonderful physician. He was a lovely man and he was as good a doctor as you could ever find: Kind, compassionate, intuitive and very, very good at his job. He was the kind of doctor who could look at you and know what was wrong before you even listed your symptoms.

One day, he did something very, very wrong. It wasn't the same thing of which Moonves stands accused but it was in the ballpark. In my physician's case, it was inexplicable and I mean by him. It was like demons had taken possession of his brain for two minutes and only two minutes…and it was not part of a pattern of misbehavior. Perhaps it could have become that but it was a one-time incident…which was still one time too many for the Medical Board. He lost his license to practice medicine and I lost the best doctor I ever had. A lot of his patients felt that way and while we turned out in support of this man, our pleas were denied. From the standpoint of the Board, he had to go — period, end of discussion. Even his victim felt the punishment was too severe.

I kept discussing it, if only with myself. It seemed wrong to throw all that medical expertise and wisdom away. I asked his successor why there wasn't some way the ousted medico could continue to advise or perhaps practice under controlled supervision. "Unfortunately," my new doctor replied, "It doesn't work like that. It should but it doesn't."

What Mr. Moonves did must be stopped…and I wonder to what extent it has been. The sheer existence of the MeToo movement and the public shaming and penalties have doubtlessly made some powerful men think, "I'd better knock off that shit." Even the vilest, most immoral boor can clean up his act if he's afraid of getting caught. I'm not suggesting they all will or have but some of them have to have stopped for fear of winding up like Harvey Weinstein.

This week, somebody must have stopped because he thought, "If Les Moonves can get caught, so can I." Too bad there's no way to measure how many have but it'll be interesting to see how many men (or even women) of power are henceforth caught harassing less-powerful employees in 2018. I'd like to think there will be none but then this also occurs to me: The punishment for the misdeeds of Moonves may turn out to be him taking his zillions of dollars and living the rest of his life in one of his many homes doing all the same things except not running a TV network. CBS and its stockholders may suffer more.

I'm not leading up here to any recommendation because I don't have one. But I thought there was a more constructive way to punish my former doctor than what they did and I can't help but think there's a better procedure to spank the Les Moonveses of the world than to give them golden parachutes and early retirement.

Sad to hear of the passing of animation producer-director Bob Curtis. And it's also sad when I think that though I worked with Bob on many shows, I never really got to know the man well. He was the producer of two seasons of Garfield and Friends and one of Mother Goose & Grimm, two shows I worked on for CBS. For the same studio (Film Roman) he did the same fine job on other programs, most notably the acclaimed Bobby's World.

He was very skilled at his job and though shouldering great responsibility and putting in long hours, I never heard him yell, never saw him lose his temper. I also do not recall not being pleased with anything he ever did. All of that added up to him being liked and respected by his colleagues. Condolences to Jeudi (his wife of sixty years) and to his sons Jeff and Kevin. He was one of the best.

• I have the feeling that tomorrow, we're going to see Rudy Giuliani walk back, deny or otherwise reverse all eleven of the contradictory positions he took today. By the weekend, he will have been on so many sides of every issue, he will have himself surrounded.

Players from Sesame Street read great lines from the movies…

Sorry I've been away. I was coping with this crisis and that crisis and one or two others, plus my power was out again. All should be well soon.

Hey, here's a real early heads up! for those of you in the L.A. area who yearn to see my fave musical group, Big Daddy. They're the guys I wrote about here and here and other places on this blog. They'll be playing at Vitello's Restaurant in Studio City the evening of Saturday, September 22. Yeah, I know that's a long way away but you can reserve a good table now and apparently a number of readers of this blog are doing so. It's a fun, inexpensive evening in a good restaurant and you might want to get tickets now. Yes, I will be there.

I am still working on my piece on the late Steve Ditko. There's so much to say that it's taking a while to chop it down to a proper size.

I tweeted the other day that there was a time when Rudy Giuliani seemed like an admirable man. I was deluged with denials of this, some even from my pro-Trump acquaintances. One of them thinks Trump is an innocent man but with Rudy as his lawyer, he'll likely get the chair. Anyway, I abhor a lot of the things Mr. Giuliani did as Mayor of New York and more since but I stand by my belief that during and after 9/11, he did some very good things and that he reminded a lot of people (who needed the reminder) what courage looked like. Which may make his current behavior even less forgivable than it already is.

Today, we seem to be up to "Trump absolutely, positively did not collude with Russia…and when there's no wiggle room left in that denial, it won't matter because it was perfectly fine that he did."

And by the way: If we ever had a prominent male Democrat who was known to dress in drag, there would not be single prominent Republican who would not denounce the guy as a moral degenerate who was unfit to serve in government in any capacity other than maybe as a decoy to ensnare rapists in public parks. And that's without all the baggage of Giuliani's marital escapades. But I still think he was a leader on 9/11, certainly more than some other prominent folks.

In California, work has commenced on the $100 billion Los Angeles-to-San Francisco bullet train. This is the same project that used to be the $75 billion Los Angeles-to-San Francisco bullet train and before that, it was the $60 billion Los Angeles-to-San Francisco bullet train and started life as the $40 billion Los Angeles-to-San Francisco bullet train. This article asks if it'll ever be completed and I can answer that. The answer is, obviously, no…but by the time it's abandoned, it may become the $150 billion Los Angeles-to-San Francisco bullet train and then the $200 billion Los Angeles-to-San Francisco bullet train and then the $300 billion Los Angeles…

I don't know if I've posted this before but even if I have, it's a classic from Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding, well worth seeing again…

A reader named Joey Fisher sent me five questions…

1. Did you really eat lunch yesterday in the CBS Commissary?
2. You seemed to have had such a great time at Comic-Con in San Diego.  Why don't you go to more conventions?
3. You're working now for the videogame company Blizzard that makes some of my favorite games.  Why didn't you tell us about this?
4. When will your long-awaited jumbo biography of Jack Kirby come out?
5. When will the next Pogo book be out?

Those are his questions.  Here are my answers…

1. Yes.  In fact, I was lunching with my occasional employer Marty Krofft.  In case I haven't made it clear here, I have lots of stories about producers I've worked for who were crooks and/or incompetents and I am not shy about telling them, especially when I omit their names.  None of those stories are about Sid and Marty Krofft.  I've worked for them on and off since the mid-seventies and I thought (and still think) they're terrific.
2. I don't go to more conventions for two reasons.  One is that I went through a period of approximately five years when my mother was dying, followed by a period of about equal length when my friend Carolyn was doing likewise.  During that span, I turned down most invites to go outta town so a lot of cons that invited me stopped inviting me.  Secondly, most cons seem to have no idea what to do with me.  They expect a guest to come in, set up a display and sell things, maybe even including autographs.  I don't like selling things and I get bored writing my name over and over.  So unless they want me to do a lot of panels (or I want the free trip to that city for other reasons), there's not much point to me being there.  At the moment, the next convention I have on my calendar is WonderCon, which is March 29-31.
3. I dunno.  I think I have more interesting things to write about than what of mine you may soon be able to purchase or watch.  Like I said, I don't like selling things.  And I think it looks terrible to make one's entire Internet presence into one continual infomercial for one's self.  When others (like publishers) remind me, I do it but it usually does not occur to me.
4. Hoping for Christmas of 2019.  Right now, I'm in the process of chopping out some sections where I wandered significantly off-topic and wrote about things peripheral to Jack.  Those hunks will probably turn up here or somewhere else but I've decided they don't belong in the book.
5. Amazon is saying they'll have it October 9 and it'll probably be sooner than that.  The insides are all printed and I know this because I actually have a printed, finished copy.  It takes a while to bind and ship them all but 10/9 should be easy.  This, I oughta be promoting here more so here's the cover…

It's a wonderful book with a fine foreword by Jake Tapper and two whole years of my favorite cartoonist at the height of his talents. Doesn't get any better than this.

• I sometimes stop and recall a day when Rudy Giuliani was a man to be admired.

When I was a kid, my family consumed a lot of See's Candy.  We always seemed to be giving someone a box of it or receiving a box of it…and those assortments presented a problem for someone like me who had major food allergies.  Unlike the Whitman's Samplers that we also sometimes had, a See's assortment had no diagram to tell you what was what.  Some of those candies, I knew, were incredibly delicious.  And some, I knew, could make me very, very sick.

So I usually dove for the Molasses Chips, which were harmless to me and had a distinctive shape.  They're the ones in the lower right corner in the above box — long and flat. But then once they were gone, I'd look at a piece like this —

— and I'd ask it, "What are you, little piece of candy? Could you hurt me?" I couldn't take the chance and I didn't want to break into it to peek because that would spoil it for someone else. So I passed on further See's. As it turned out, that was usually a wise decision. The above piece was Milk Chocolate Coconut Creme which would have about the same effect on me that Chocolate Covered Cyanide would have on you.

My mother often took me with her into the See's shop that was then in the shopping center on Pico Boulevard near Westwood. There, they had the pre-packaged boxes of assorted, unidentifiable treats. They also had all the different varieties on display individually on trays with labels. So you could purchase a quarter-pound of orange creams (yum) or divinity puffs (lethal). I don't know if this is still a custom at those stores but when we went in, a nice lady behind the counter would randomly select a piece of candy from the display case and present it to me as a freebee. I'd always watch to see which tray it came from and it was always something I knew I shouldn't eat. Always.

I'd turn it down as politely as I could and she'd look at me in shock. A child declining free candy? What was wrong with that boy? She'd stare at my mother and think, "That woman is raising the Spawn of Mephistopheles. Maybe I should save humanity and kill him now!"

But I'd ignore her withering glares or maybe I'd work up the courage to ask politely for a Molasses Chip. One time, I naively asked for chocolate-covered cashews and the clerk gasped and then said, putting an indignant pause between each word, "Young man! See's Candy does not make chocolate-covered cashews!" I never felt more out of touch with reality in my entire life.

Anyway, here's a little video about how they make See's Candy featuring a man who probably spends his weekends entering John Goodman Look-Alike Contests. And by the way, do you know who owns See's Candy these days? Warren Buffett. He bought the firm in 1972, little suspecting that 33 years later, I would stop eating candy of any kind. Hope he was able to weather the horrific plunge in sales that must have occurred then.

I just read the Ronan Farrow article alleging sexual misconduct by many at CBS but especially C.E.O. Les Moonves. Here's a link to it.

It's quite damning and quite thorough and it was all I could do to remind myself that it may be only one side of a complex matter. No matter how strong a case may seem, you need to wait and hear all the evidence before you make up your mind.

That is, if you do make up your mind and that isn't always necessary. I can certainly condemn the kind of behavior alleged and contribute in my own small way to stamping it out without deciding this guy I barely met touched that woman I never met in those inappropriate places during incidents years ago at which I was not present. (I met Mr. Moonves once but nothing in that brief encounter gave me a scintilla of insight into whether he was the kind of man who'd do what the article says he did.)

What I guess I'm saying is that I don't have to form a firm opinion as to his guilt or innocence, and I may not even be qualified to do that. But we're all qualified to say that anyone who would do stuff like that is a horrible human being and we oughta be saying it more. The problem of sexual impropriety is bigger than any one case and it wouldn't/shouldn't be lessened if it somehow turns out that Moonves is innocent.

Crimes are crimes. Every day in this country it seems, someone who is accused or even convicted of murder is found to be Not Guilty. That doesn't make murder any more acceptable.

So that was one thought I had while reading Farrow's article. Another is that as a reporter, he's very thorough when he writes of cases that do not involve his own family.

When it comes to damning the man who may or may not be his father (and he doesn't seem to want to even clear that up), he believes we should believe every word of testimony by his younger sister and we should ignore all evidence to the contrary, including the testimony of his older sister and older brother. It's easy to build an iron-clad case against someone when you can pick and choose your facts…something to remember any time an article makes you believe someone is guilty.

• I had lunch today in the CBS commissary and it was so sad. The bus boy was Les Moonves.

• On May 6, current Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani described former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen as "an honest, honorable lawyer." On July 26, he described Cohen as "a pathological liar." What is it about being Trump's lawyer that makes you unable to get your story straight?

Eric Idle, whom we admire greatly, has an autobiography coming out soon. Actually, he calls it a "sortabiography" but whatever it is, I'm sure it'll be well worth buying and reading. If you'd like to get a head start on the buying part of that, here's a link to pre-order a copy.

Or perhaps you'd prefer a signed copy which you'd receive in person after hearing him talk in person about his life and book.  Mr. Idle is making a tour and he's scheduled so far to be in New York City, Boston, Naperville (that's in Illinois), Seattle, San Francisco and Culver City.  Culver City is a section of Los Angeles and his appearance there will be in a high school auditorium.  You can find out all the wheres and whens, and maybe even order tickets, at this webpage.

Today's alarming non-Trump news is that the company that makes Necco Wafers is shutting down production. This is apparently not a permanent thing. They're selling the product to another firm that will resume production and that will appease the lovers of Necco Wafers — a piece of news that makes me want to ask in my best Jerry Seinfeld impression, "Who are these people?"

The product has been around since 1847 so simple logic will tell you that there must be folks who buy and enjoy them. I have never heard of such a person. I don't eat candy at all anymore but when I did, Necco Wafers were the last thing I would ever eat. I would eat cole slaw mixed with candy corn before I would eat a Necco Wafer. I think I once tasted about half of one and spit it out, making a mental note not to make that mistake again. At the drug store candy display, my friends and I would point at the Necco Wafers and say things like "I can't believe they still make those!" and "They're made out of the finest grade Necco!" One buddy of mine assumed "Necco" was Italian for "Polystyrene."

Take a look at this video of how Necco Wafers are made. Is there anything in here that makes you want to try one? That suggests they'd taste any better than poker chips?