Here's a nice print of "The Silent Partner," a 1955 episode of the TV series Screen Directors Playhouse, which was one of the last things the Hal Roach Studio produced. It was directed and co-written by George Marshall, who honed his craft working on the Roach lot with Laurel and Hardy before becoming an important director elsewhere.
"The Silent Partner" stars Buster Keaton, Joe E. Brown and frequent Roach player Zasu Pitts. You'll also see a lot of familiar character actors including Jack Elam, Jack Kruschen, Evelyn Ankers, Percy Helton and Charles Horvath. Enjoy…
Thanks to Joel O'Brien for sending me this link to a 1985 interview with Bill Gaines, the original publisher of MAD. There are a few errors in it. Alfred E. Neuman's usual name before he was named Alfred E. Neuman was Melvin Cowznofski, not Melvin Paslovsky. Harvey Kurtzman is mentioned in passing but not in the section which describes how MAD was created. Somehow, Al Feldstein who became editor a few years later gets the credit. Gaines did not sell MAD to Warner Communications in 1960, etc.
I get asked a lot of questions about the history of MAD and often, the answer includes, "You have to know a lot about Bill Gaines to understand why things were the way they were." Gaines was an eccentric who wanted to keep his company small enough so that he could preside over most of the business matters himself, not work too hard and not have a lot of strangers around him. He didn't write or draw for the magazine but had an undeniable influence on its creative content.
His business practices were not much different from any comic book publisher and in that sense, somewhat unfair to the talent. And yet at the same time, he loved the writers and artists who contributed to MAD, treated them as a family, took them on expensive trips and treated them to swank dinners and so forth. You could work for DC and Marvel for decades and never meet the publisher or be granted an audience if you requested one…but Gaines' door was always open and if you dropped in at the proper hour, he'd take you to lunch. A very colorful, complex man.
Usually, I just plug live performances in Southern California — i.e., those I can get to. But two of my best pals are playing in or near Chicago and I'd go to these shows if I was there.
One is a one-time-only (for now) appearance by the glamorous, gifted Shelly Goldstein who'll be doing her cabaret show, "How Groovy Girls Saved the World" this Saturday evening at Studio 5 in Evanston, Illinois. It's a delightful assemblage of the kind of songs sung by female vocalists of the sixties like Petula Clark, Mama Cass and Jackie DeShannon, plus some of Shelly's own witty compositions. Tickets are going fast but you may still be able to snag a deuce (that's theater talk) at this website. I've seen her many times and always attend any performance within 2,000 miles of my home. This one, sad to say, is 34 miles too far for me but possibly not for you.
My buddy Frank Ferrante has been getting rave reviews for the new show which Teatro ZinZanni has opened in the heart of Chi. Teatro ZinZanni is an outfit that stages dinner shows with gourmet food, a great live band, luscious surroundings and wonderful entertainment between the courses. Your genial/outrageous host Caesar is your guide and Caesar is Frank when he's not being Groucho. This show isn't as urgent a go-see as Shelly's because Caesar will be Caesaring through the end of September but don't miss it, either. Info and tickets can be found at this website. It's an evening you won't soon forget.
Those of you who want to know about all the sturm und drang in the halls of DC Comics would do well to read Rob Salkowitz on the topic. There is much more to be said about this topic but everything Rob writes here is, as far as I can tell, absolutely on target.
We're still thinking about Minnie Mouse and about the lovely Minnie-like actress who did her voice, Russi Taylor. Esteemed Disney historian Jim Korkis sent me this…
Like Mickey Mouse, Minnie only did squeaks and squawks provided by Walt Disney himself in the earliest cartoons. Marcellite Garner from the ink and paint department began doing Minnie's dialog in 1930. Thelma Boardman took over from approximately 1940-1942 followed by Ruth Clifford from around late 1942 to 1952. Russi Taylor became Minnie's official voice in 1986.
I am sure many people have shared Russi and Wayne stories with you. One of mine was that back in the 1990s when I worked at Walt Disney World, I got to be their unofficial tour guide and helped them do things like get V.I.P. viewing for the fireworks at Epcot. I joked to them that they could never get divorced because it would break the hearts of every Disney fan knowing Mickey and Minnie got divorced. Wayne took the offhand remark very seriously and started explaining in great detail why he could never divorce Russi because she was so important in his life. Russi, realizing it was just a joke, kept laughing and laughing. I still hear that joyful laugh decades later.
Russi did have a great laugh. Meanwhile, I got this from Jon Balogh…
It's disturbing to hear about all those voice artists lining up to get a crack at Russi Taylor's job. Could you advise on the ethics of such matters? I'm not a voice actor but I'm curious. When would it be okay to apply for that kind of job? What if the actor is still alive but just can't do the voice any longer?
If the actor who voices an established character dies, a potential replacement should wait a suitable interval — and no, I can't tell you what would make an interval suitable but I know it's more than a week or two — before even thinking about moving in on the role. I would think one should wait longer if the deceased actor originated the voice in question. Something like fifteen people have now been the voice of Bugs Bunny and no one's had the job exclusively like Mel Blanc did. If the current guy dies, it's not as big a deal.
If the actor is alive but the studio thinks he can no longer do the voice well, that's where it gets dicey. When Don Messick had the stroke that ended his acting career, he had his agent notify the studios than he was retiring and they should go ahead and recast Scooby Doo and other iconic parts he played. That is rare. Usually, the actor doesn't want to give up that important part of their lives and careers and admit they can't do it anymore. And sometimes, they don't agree that they can't.
June Foray wanted to keep working until the day she died. She was polite to a vast number of actresses who did their imitations of her for her, perhaps hoping she'd endorse them as her replacement…but she was privately pissed about every one of them. I don't think any voice actor really wants to hear that you can imitate them well, though most will be too polite to tell you that.
I was in the room one day when a noted voice actor decided for some silly reason to do his Bugs Bunny voice for Mel Blanc. At the time, Mel was getting paid very well every time Warner Brothers called on him to do Bugs — and deservedly so. The execs there used to weep and wail over what it cost to hire Mel and I thought that was petty and greedy of them. There were a number of people who were responsible for Bugs becoming a character worth billions and if Mel wasn't at the absolute top of that list, he was right behind whoever was.
Still, at least one of the WB suits talked to me like Mel was shamefully holding a gun to their heads. The exec was very well paid himself and used the old "it'll only take him twenty minutes" line to justify his resentment of Mel's asking price; no recognition that there was a special value to WB to have Mel Blanc voicing a Mel Blanc character. Even leaving aside the horrendous publicity that might have resulted, some good mimic doing Bugs was not — and still is not — the same thing as Mel friggin' Blanc doing Bugs.
So when that noted voice actor showed Mel he could do a great Bugs, Mel did not take it as the sincerest form of flattery. The guy might just as well have said, "Hey, Mel! One of these days, some dunce at WB will decide to save money and have me replace you!" Oddly enough, the noted voice actor in this story had been in Mel's position. He was holding out for a raise to do a famous character he voiced, they hired an imitator for less money and he was furious with that "scab" (as he called him) forever after.
Generally speaking, most good voice actors will tell you that you don't imitate another actor while he's still live and available. You just don't. If the reason they want you to do him is because they think he's just too old, that gets dicey and you have to really analyze and discuss the situation. Ideally, what should happen is that the studio should deal with that actor before they seek out a replacement; maybe pay him a fee, maybe find him other work which he can do.
If the reason is just that he wants a raise, you don't undercut him. It's that simple and most successful voice actors will tell you this. I know of at least three separate occasions where Actor A was offered serious money — in one instance, millions — to imitate and replace Actor B but Actor A said absolutely not.
In every case, the Actor A was working steadily and didn't need the dough. Still, there's a certain amount of integrity and decency involved in turning down a job worth six or even seven figures for reasons of principle and it is to be admired. By me, at least.
Ultimately, all this is one of the things agents are for. An actor who covets someone else's job will always (always) look like an asshole of some dimension for campaigning on their own. The way to avoid that is to have your agent contact the person who does the hiring and say, "Hey, I know one of these days, you may need a soundalike for Abercrombie Alligator. If and when that happens, I hope you'll read my client before you make a final decision."
That's how professionals do it. If you want that kind of job, professionalism is a great quality to display.
As we noted here, Lenny's Deli — a fine establishment in West Los Angeles — has closed. We are pleased to report the news that it will be replaced by…another delicatessen! Wise Sons Jewish Delicatessen, a popular place in San Francisco, is moving into the building soon. Let's hope they can make a go of it!
A few items back here, I said that I thought Carol Burnett was a lot less than good in the 1974 film version of The Front Page. And that's not just my opinion. It's Carol Burnett's opinion, too…
In punishment for allowing their massive data breach, I'd like to see Capital One fined just enough money that they can't afford to mail me eleven credit card offers per week for the rest of my life.
The New Yorker has a very, very long article by Connie Bruck about Alan Dershowitz, mainly about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein is the latest in a long line of clients via whom Professor Dershowitz has systematically sullied his own, once-proud reputation. There isn't much there left to sully but he's doing what he can to eliminate the last vestiges.
I blame a certain amount of my personal cynicism on the list of public figures I once respected and later felt I'd either misjudged or seen them throw away what was once valid respect. Dershowitz is on the list somewhere between John McCain and Bill Cosby. There's a quote in the article that gets to one reason why. A judge who presided over a case involving Dershowitz said, "He has squandered his position as a Harvard law professor and a civil libertarian — for the sole purpose of being on TV."
As I mentioned a month or so ago here, the Kino Lorber company is releasing a Blu-ray of Billy Wilder's 1974 remake of the movie The Front Page starring Jack Lemmon as Hildy Johnson and Walter Matthau as Walter Burns. I really like this version of the classic play of the same name by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur.
I like the pace. I like the supporting players. I like the interplay between Lemmon and Matthau. I like just about everything in it except Carol Burnett who seemed to be filmed playing in some other movie with a totally different style and then greenscreened into this one. Please note that I say that as someone who loves just about everything else Carol Burnett ever did.
Sorry to say, there is no DVD coming out of this release, at least now. There is a DVD still in print but the Blu-ray, I'm told, is a much superior transfer and of course it has some extra features and two world-class movie experts did a commentary track that isn't on any DVD. Those two world-class movie experts are none other than my friend Michael Schlesinger and myself.
At least, I think I'm on it. I had a bad cough the day we recorded the track and I wouldn't blame them if they chopped out a lot of what I said. But Mike had all sorts of interesting, non-hacking things to say about the film so you'll be in good hands.
The Blu-ray ships next week so if you want to advance order it, here's a link. I'm pleased to be a part of it, assuming I am a part of it.
Russi Taylor, the voice of Minnie Mouse, passed away last Friday. Over the weekend, my friend Bob Bergen vented on Facebook about some calls he'd already received. Bob is an expert voice actor and one of the best coaches of that art/craft (whichever you think it is). What he was venting about were some calls he'd already received from actresses who asked if they could hire him to coach them to perhaps snag the plum job of replacing Russi as Ms. Mouse.
No auditions have been announced. Russi's funeral has not even occurred as far as I know. But some people are not about to waste any time trying to grab her job. And I just got a call from a voice actress asking if I knew anyone over in the Disney Character Voices Division and could put in a good word for her there. No, I don't and if I did, I wouldn't.
In pieces I've posted here about how to get jobs as a writer, a point I've made repeatedly is that one of the worst things you can do is to appear desperate. Another bad thing — one I don't think I mentioned because I figured everyone kinda knew this instinctively — is to come across as an asshole. If you're absolutely oozing with talent and no one else comes close, they might (note that I italicized "might") put up with some of that because you're worth it. But the odds are you're not oozing and even if you are, they still might think you'd be too much trouble.
Someone will replace Russi as Minnie because these characters live on and Russi was, after all, one of many over the years who spoke for the lovely M.M. There may even be a "back-up" person already selected — someone who recorded Minnie's lines if/when Russi was unavailable or did something for live appearances that Russi couldn't do. Perhaps one such person will inherit the role. Perhaps they'll do a search, I don't know…but it will be after a suitable interval, not later this week.
I do know that it's really tacky to be hustling for the job of the recently-deceased. It's like looking into the open coffin and saying, "Hey, they won't need that diamond ring where they're going." Some of you may be familiar with the story of how at the memorial service for Lorenzo Music, I was approached by two separate voice actors who felt there was no better time to let me know they felt qualified to step into the role of Garfield.
That story is, sadly, true. Neither of them got the job, by the way. Neither was considered. The guy who got it didn't even inquire.
There's an old saying that I just made up: If you want to be a professional, act like one.
The folks I now hear saying that Joe Biden can't win were once telling me that Donald Trump couldn't win. And they kept telling me that a lot closer to that Election Day.
Jewish delicatessens seem to be closing faster these days than even movies about DC super-heroes. The latest shuttering is a personal one to me: Lenny's Deli in Westwood closes tonight, apparently for good. This will bring to an end, the story of Junior's Delicatessen…a favorite place of mine for well over half a century. It also means that Ken Levine and I have to find another place to meet for lunch.
Junior's started life as a small deli on Pico Boulevard, just east of Westwood. Maria's Italian Kitchen is now in that location. Junior's, when it was there, was a little, friendly place run by the Saul Brothers, Marvin and Eddie. They cut the meat. They waited on you. Most of their business was take-out but there were a few tables and chairs there and if you wanted to sit and eat your corned beef on rye, they'd make it behind the counter and bring it to your table.
That Junior's opened there in 1959. By 1967, they opened the larger, mostly sit-down restaurant a few blocks away on Westwood, just north of Pico. It was a great deli and fabulously successful. If you'd ever dreamed of owning your own delicatessen, you'd have dreamed of a place like that, full of regulars, many of them celebrities.
At some point — I know not when or why — Eddie Saul disappears from this story. He went out to the valley and opened a couple of delicatessens on his own. None of the articles written about Junior's after that mentioned him and once when I was there, when I innocently asked Marvin about his brother, I got back an icy silence and a stare that told me I'd brought up a forbidden topic. You now know as much about this as I do and probably ever will.
Junior's was very popular but it was always worth the wait for a table. I didn't think the corned beef was as good as Art's in Studio City, or the potato salad was as good as Nate n' Al's in Beverly Hills or the matzo ball soup was as good as Canter's over on Fairfax…but everything was way more than edible and Junior's had a great location and a fun atmosphere and a great bakery. Plus, you could often spot Mel Brooks eating there. Wouldn't you want to go to a deli where Mel Brooks ate? Of course you would.
I'm not sure if the decline started before or after Mel Brooks shifted his patronage mainly to Factor's Deli, a couple miles east on Pico. But by the turn of the century, Junior's wasn't as good as it had once been and was nowhere near as busy.
Some newspaper articles blamed management problems after Marvin Saul retired and turned the operation over to his kids. Well, maybe…but to us regular patrons, the problems started much earlier than that. Rising rents were also blamed and there's probably some truth to that explanation. But after Junior's closed at the end of 2012, the business was reopened two months later as Lenny's Deli by the local restauranteur Lenny Rosenberg. If Lenny could manage the rent, why couldn't the Sauls?
I think there were two problems. One was that the quality of Junior's had simply slipped. It just plain wasn't as good as it had once been. Mr. Rosenberg did a good job reversing time there…so good that once after Ken and I lunched there, we sought him out to thank him for his restoration job. But I guess there wasn't much he could do about the other problem, which is that people just don't go to Jewish-style delis as much as they once did. If you know it isn't good for you to eat a thick pastrami sandwich with a big knish and a chocolate egg cream, it's hard to go to a place that serves that and then order anything else.
Rumor has it that Lenny sold the place recently and it's the new owners who are closing it as of tonight. I'll miss it for any number of reasons but a biggie is that it was a landmark in one of the great memories of my life. This is going to sound silly but so do a lot of the great memories of my life…
In the early sixties, I fell in love with the work of the great satirist and recording artist Stan Freberg. There was a record store then on Westwood Boulevard — less than a mile from where I grew up — and I went there often in search of new Stan Freberg records. Maddeningly, they did not come out as rapidly as I wished, and I especially wanted to buy Volume II of Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America.
Volume I was and still is the greatest comedy album I ever heard. Actually, it's not so much a comedy record as a great Broadway musical that never existed as anything but its cast album. In any case, I kept going back to that record store, week after week, asking if Volume II was out yet. It never was.
I stopped asking in 1967 for an understandable reason: The record store closed and the building containing it was torn down. The big, successful Junior's was built on that piece of land. And in 1996 in a booth in Junior's, Stan Freberg asked me to help him produce that second volume — on the exact same piece of real estate where thirty-four years earlier, I'd made a pest of myself asking, "Is Volume Two out yet?"
A lot of other great things happened at Junior's/Lenny's, as well, but that's my favorite.
Oh, you'll like this. Boy, will you like this. For a number of years at Comic-Con, I had the honor/privilege/thrill (it was many other things, as well) of interviewing Mr. Ray Bradbury. Ray came down to Comic-Con almost every year just for Saturday. If he'd wanted to stay over, they would have given him the grandest suite in town but I don't think that ever happened. What he wanted, first of all, was to have the option of not showing up if he felt like sleeping or doing something else that day.
He'd get up that morning, decide that he wanted to make the trip and he'd have someone pick him up and drive him down there, arriving around 10 AM, give or take an hour. Once in a while, someone on the con staff would seek me out just to confirm, "He's on his way," meaning the interview would not be canceled. It was not canceled any of the years I did it and I don't know that it was ever canceled before I began doing it.
But he always seemed to have that option…and why not? If he'd called in sick, what were they going to do to him? It's hard to fire a guy you're not paying, especially if he's Ray Bradbury.
He'd spend the morning browsing the hall, looking at this and that, sometimes buying this or that. I recall him arguing with a dealer who had a rare old pulp magazine he wanted. The dealer wanted Ray to just take it and Ray was insisting on paying. The quarrel got a bit nastier than a disagreement about that should ever get and I think they wound up compromising — Ray paid half-price.
Sometimes, he'd run into an old friend like Julius Schwartz, Forrest Ackerman or Stan Freberg and they'd embrace and catch up on things. If you noticed and recognized him, he was glad to sign whatever you wanted signed and to talk about whatever you wanted to talk about. I'm sure there are many, many folks out there who still treasure those encounters. He had a way of shifting the topic from himself to you. You'd ask him about The Martian Chronicles and wind up talking about what you did or wanted to do for a living.
If you were passionate about something, especially if it was to someday be a writer or artist, he would tell you that you reminded him of himself at your age. That was a powerful feeling he had at the con and he expressed it in so many ways.
The interview was scheduled for 2 PM or 3 PM, not to run more than an hour. He always told me that if we reached a good stopping point five or ten minutes before the scheduled end time, I should just call a halt to the proceedings then. Like any good writer, Ray understood the value of ending strong.
He'd have lunch somewhere and then a half-hour before our scheduled start time, I would meet him in the Pro Suite for a chat and a very brief discussion about what we'd be talking about. I don't know why we did that because we never followed the plan. He'd ask me to get him to tell a certain anecdote and then, out in front of that always-packed audience, I'd ask him to tell that story and he'd say, "Oh, I don't want to talk about that." There's a little of that in the video below. He asked me before the conversation to ask him about his days hanging out at Clifton's Cafeteria in downtown L.A., I did and then he didn't answer.
I learned that everything went best when I recalled or researched a great story he'd told many times before and then led him into it. Shortly before the chat below, he'd appeared on a little-watched cable show that Dennis Miller was hosting. Ray started telling a story that was too long for the time remaining so Miller rushed him through it, then cut him off before the punch line. Late in this conversation, I got Ray to tell it in full. Whenever I could steer him into the right tale, it was magic. I just sat there in the best seat in the house and enjoyed Ray Bradbury talking, sometimes at great length. Even at his advanced age, he was one of the best public speakers I've ever seen.
I'd look out at the audience while Ray was doing what he did so well and I'd see this scene in so many rows: A parent roughly my age had brought his or her kid(s) to hear this amazing man they'd probably never heard of…and the kids were all staring with stark wonderment at us up on stage — well, at Ray — absorbing every single word. I wished I'd had a concession outside the room selling Ray Bradbury books. I would have made a bloody fortune.
So my job was to introduce him, cue some stories and get out of the way, then get us off the stage at the proper moment. The last one or two times we did this, I had an extra task. Ray's daughter asked me to, as much as possible, keep Ray off certain topics. In his dotage, he'd developed some strange notions, mostly relating to how men should treat women.
It was not a matter of anyone wanting to censor Ray Bradbury — as if anyone or anything could. It was just that things went better when he spoke on these topics instead of those topics. In this video, I was asked to keep him off the topic of Michael Moore's then-current movie, Fahrenheit 9/11. As you will see, I did not succeed.
This is our conversation from 2004, since which time I've lost about 65% of that hair and 135 pounds off the rest of me. It's in three parts which should play one after the other in the player below. Thanks to Shane Shellenbarger for saving this lovely example of how spellbinding this man could be.
