For much of the pandemic, my pal Charlie Frye has been recording little videos in his workshop of him doing amazing things. I've featured a few here and it would certainly be worth your time to search YouTube and see all of them. Great credit should also go to the lovely Sherry Frye, who does all the real work.
This is the last one in the series. Take it full screen and watch Charlie do a routine that he can probably do forwards and backwards…
Here's an even better article explaining what happened. Mark Joseph Stern lays the blame, as others are doing today, squarely on the "deal" made by a previous prosecutor, Bruce Castor.
Cosby issued a statement trying to spin his release as some sort of proof that he was innocent. The court didn't say you were innocent, Bill. If you try to make public appearances in the future, I'm sure the people outside with signs will explain it to you.
And here's a better article explaining the decision.
The CNN website just posted this correction…
Correction: An earlier version of this post said that the Supreme Court indicated that prosecutors went too far to call up to five other alleged victims to establish a pattern against Cosby. The majority opinion says in a footnote that they didn't consider that issue.
So ignore what I said about that being the reason for the decision this morning. Here's what seems to be a better explanation…
In 2019, an interim court upheld the trial verdict. But the Supreme Court, the state's highest court, agreed to consider the case, and at a hearing in December, some of the court's seven justices questioned prosecutors sharply.
In their 79-page opinion, the judges wrote that a "non-prosecution agreement" that had been struck with a previous prosecutor meant that Mr. Cosby should not have been charged in the case, and that he should be discharged. They barred a retrial.
In any case, the point is that Cosby was not released because a court said he was innocent…as some online seem to think. He's going free because they decided there were procedural errors in the trial via which he was convicted.
Bill Cosby is reportedly going to be released from prison today after the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court ruled that his conviction was the result of an improperly-conducted trial. As I understand it — and real analysts are still scrambling to analyze the ruling — the state's high court said that since Cosby was on trial for one specific alleged molestation, the judge should not have allowed testimony by alleged victims of other alleged crimes to establish a "pattern."
I have no idea if, going strictly by the law as written, that's a proper ruling. It does seem odd to suggest that the fact that he raped a lot of other women is not relevant (or should not be relevant) to the question of whether he raped the one in question. But in this country, guilty people do sometimes go free because of judicial error.
I doubt this is going to change any minds anywhere about whether he was guilty or not. The ruling does not address that question. It merely says that the judge erred to allow something he allowed. It's going to cause a lot of people to say that when you have his kind of money, you can always get the kind of lawyers who can make things go your way…and that view is true more often than it should be.
You can already hear the disappointment of those who celebrated his conviction. It showed it was possible that wealthy and powerful men could be held accountable for preying on those who lacked wealth and power…and now, wealth and power seems to have won in the end. Then again, it's not like Cosby wasn't punished at all and is leaving with a solid case that he was innocent. There must be lots of rich guys out there who were dissuaded from doing the kind of thing he did because they thought, "If they can nail him, they can nail me." I don't think they'll change their minds about that now. But it does seem very wrong for William Henry Cosby Jr. to be a free man.
You wonder — well, I wonder — what he thinks he's going to do now. Does he think he has a chance of getting back some of his old respect and career? Is he going to try? Or is he just going to stay in whatever mansions he has left and stay out of the public eye for the rest of his life? If he's smart, he'll do the latter…but if he was smart, he wouldn't have done the things that caused all those women to line up to testify against him in the first place.
The Criterion Collection puts out the best DVDs and Blu-rays of great movies. They don't just slap a movie on a disc. They do costly restoration work, they find experts (including, once, me) to do commentary tracks. They produce bonus features. I have a lot of their releases in my collection.
In their office, they have a special closet full of films they've issued and they occasionally invite important people to come in, help themselves and explain why they're taking what they're taking. Here, for example, is Nathan Lane…
This first appeared on this blog in July of 2013. In the last few weeks, a couple of folks who couldn't locate it via my search engine asked me where it was and if I would repost it. Here it is and it starts with a letter from a reader who later wrote to thank me for writing it and for omitting his name…
Inspired by your latest Tales of Your Father, a question occurs to me that you might not know the answer to. As I'm sure you're aware, most people who set out to be professional writers do not make a living at it right away. In fact, even most of those who manage to sell their stuff never make the bulk of their living from it. I certainly won't attribute all of this to luck; apart from raw talent you obviously work at it. (I have no idea how you can keep up your blog so well and do your professional writing, for instance….)
The question I have is: for someone trying to break into professional writing today, what's the most open market to aim at?
The reason I realize that you might not be the best person to answer that question is that the market has changed so radically since you started writing, and the markets you make most of your living from today are, I think, not the ones you would advise a beginner to shoot for (at least not if he's hoping to make money at it). I think you've mentioned comics specifically as a near-impossible field for a writer to get into these days, and I'm pretty skeptical at a beginner getting television assignments either. (And, apropos of your story, porn novels of the type you're talking about are pretty scarce these days, too…VCRs, DVDs, and the internet have pretty much wiped them out, though I'm sure there are still some kinds of writing jobs to be had in that industry.)
But while you're writing for more selective markets, if you do know of any segments of the industry that are crying out for people who can put sentences together and even spell most of the words right, it might be something of interest to some of your readers besides just myself.
(Just as an aside: some years back…ten or fifteen, I think….I attended a panel at the San Diego Comic-Con on breaking into comics as an artist or writer. Most of the time was spent talking about art, but when it came to writing, they said there were four basic paths: (1) be an artist, and if you're good, someday they might let you writes some of your own stuff; (2) be a successful writer in another field; (3) move to New York, get a job at Marvel or DC as an assistant editor, work long hours for low pay, and hope to move up; or (4) submit unsolicited stuff and hope it stands out in the slush pile. The pro editors there all agreed the latter was possible….but none of them could remember actually ever buying anything that way…)
Well, you're right that you're asking me for advice with a problem I really haven't faced since 1969…and in a line of work that is forever changing. But I think I can give you a few tips…
Stay out of slush piles. There's a reason they're called that. Most of the unsolicited submissions that any editor or producer receives are not very good. Now, you might think, "Ah, but then my superior work will really stand out" and the answer is that assuming your work is superior — and it may not be as superior as you'd like to think — it doesn't. Being in that pile lumps you in with the folks who are in there because their work is so unexceptional that they haven't been able to be considered via any more direct, dignified route.
Moreover, in most companies, very little attention is paid to the slush pile. The top folks with the power to buy things rarely (if ever) look at it. Often, it's assigned to glorified interns to cull through, meaning that your work is read by people who hope not to find gold in them thar hills because they themselves want to fill any openings and get away from glorified interning.
The main path to writing comic books these days seems to be to your #2 — to have credits in movies or TV or gaming or any of the fields which comic book publishers like to think of as their main areas. Only a few comic book publishers these days are interested in publishing comic books for the sake of publishing comic books. Most see the comics as loss leaders to leverage them into other, more lucrative areas.
The secondary path — and it's a distant second — seems to be to make a splash with a comic for a small publisher. But it's hard to do stand-out work at a publisher which hires its artists at the 99-Cent Store and if you do great work in that venue, it may not get noticed in the major leagues. I started writing comics in 1970 and I don't recall it ever being this difficult for a newcomer to break in.
There's rarely a high-profile marketplace that is easy for new writers to crack…and for the same reason that there's never a lottery that's a cinch to win. Too many other people want to do it…and if the number of openings were to ever double, the number of applicants would probably triple. The one that would be easiest for you depends on two things: What you're good at and what kind of connections you have. You may think you can write anything but even if that's true — and it isn't — you're better at one kind of material than another. You need to weigh demand against the things you're best at and pursue whatever has the best ratio. If you're best at writing Gregorian Chants and second-best at writing wacky sitcoms, I'd go with the latter.
But really, it comes down to access. Do you know anyone in any company for which you'd like to work? Do you have a non-pushy way of approaching someone? And if you don't have access, you need to look for the markets that aren't high-profile, the ones that don't have a slush pile. That's what I did back in '69 when I submitted to Laugh-In magazine. There was an editor sitting there with pages to fill and no one to fill them. This never happens with Superman and Spider-Man.
It's not easy to become a professional writer and it's more difficult, though in a different way, to remain one for any length of time. It never has been easy and it never will be so I don't encourage anyone. I think a lot of people who believe they'd be happy to work in that area would actually be happier doing something else.
You have to be willing to accept a certain uncertainty in your life and you need to really, really keep a good perspective on your work and its value. If you undervalue it or overvalue it, you cannot succeed. And you need to be pragmatic about where you can get your work read and actually considered by people with the power to buy or hire. Once you have experience and a rep, it's different…though often not as different as you might think or wish. I'll post more tips here in the future as I think of them.
Can you believe Ray Stevens is still performing and making records? He's 82 and he's still at it. Back when I put "Gitarzan" on my mixtape, he often had hits in the mainstream Top 20 or at least the Top 50. At some point, he narrowed in on a country-western audience and did just fine. He's had a couple of his own theaters over the years and starred in a couple of syndicated TV shows that I don't think ever made it to TV here in Los Angeles.
I liked a number of his records, mainly for the sheer silliness of them. He also never seemed to care what other artists were recording or where the music business was going. He just put out Ray Stevens record after Ray Stevens record. Here's a video (and re-recording) he made of "Gitarzan," long after it was on the charts — which it was in 1969. It adheres to the old show business rule that you can't go wrong with a bunch of guys in gorilla suits…
And while we're on the subject of Mr. Stevens, here's a song he recorded that came out too late to be on my mixtape. It's called "I Need Your Help, Barry Manilow." I remember when I first heard it, I thought, "That's great but I'll bet Stevens didn't write it." I was right. It was written by Dale Gonyea, who I recall popping up in Los Angeles showrooms and in the credits for TV shows where he wrote "Special Musical Material." Very funny guy…
Several folks have written in to tell me that Petula Clark wasn't lip-syncing in this video I linked to. Someone took a video of her singing "My Love" somewhere and overdubbed the record. They're right and I should have noticed that.
Someone else (one person) wrote to point out what they thought was a grievous error. I said my little mixtape, which I am reconstructing via video links here, was "compiled between approximately 1967 and 1972. Some of the songs are from before '67 since KHJ played "oldies," defining them as anything (I think) that had been off the charts for more than about eight weeks." This person wrote to ask how "My Love" could have been on it since it came out in 1966.
David Leonhardt charts how COVID-19 is making a comeback in some areas of this country…some notably non-vaccinated areas of this country. Oh, I hope this is not so but it apparently is.
It was one thing when we didn't have the means to combat this disease. It's quite another when we do and people don't want to use those means because…well, I understand fear of putting a relatively-new drug into one's system. Then again, I do know (semi-distantly) a guy who won't get the vaccine for that reason but if you handed him an unlabeled drug and said, "Here, this'll give you a glorious high," it would be in his veins faster than you could say "Timothy Leary."
The ones I really don't get are the ones who took a position that the virus was a hoax, there was some sort of plot to vaccinate Americans to control their minds, all that stuff about people dying was phony, et cetera…and now they'd rather get the Delta variant than admit they might have been wrong.
Lastly for now: Way past the announced deadline and way past the time the judges decided, folks are still sending me nominations or this year's Bill Finger Awards for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. Those nominations will roll over to next year so no harm done. Six posthumous recipients for this year will be announced shortly. Next year, we hope to present one — hopefully, more than one — to someone alive.
Four minutes of a tortoise eating a strawberry. Okay, so they aren't fast eaters. They aren't fast anything…
Since I've written a lot here about late night TV in the past, I have a few e-mails asking why I haven't written anything about the last Conan show with Conan O'Brien which aired this past week on TBS. I guess I don't have as much interest in late night as I once did.
Leaving aside John Oliver, the only show I regularly TiVo is Stephen Colbert's and more than half the time, I watch highlights from an episode on YouTube, then delete the show from the TiVo without watching the recording. I wonder how much of the decline in late night viewing is from folks like me who figure, "Why watch the whole hour when I can watch the best fifteen minutes online…and miss all those commercials?"
I watch YouTube videos from Seth Meyers — especially "A Closer Look" — and now and then clips from James Corden, Jimmy Fallon, Bill Maher, Andy Cohen and Jimmy Kimmel. As much as I don't like Donald Trump, there are times when I'm just plain oversaturated with jokes or even criticisms about the man, especially late at night when I'm trying to calm my brain down before beddy-bye.
I've barely watched Conan O'Brien on TBS. I tried. Really, I did.
I thought he was wonderful for about the first half of Late Night on NBC. There was really sharp comedy writing on that series and as David Letterman noted when he famously guested there, they were doing a lot of it every night. And Conan, I thought, was terrific at playing straight in most of those sketches and bits. He was also really good at letting his guests talk and staying out of the way when they were en route to a great punchline.
At some point though, the show began doing less and less prepared material and more and more of the show, it seemed to me, was Conan trying to see how much he could talk about nothing in particular. I had the same problem with Letterman in his last decade.
I greatly admire what Conan did…coming from nowhere, getting a job few thought he deserved and then doing it so well that he came to seem like a natural for it. It's really one of the great stories of Show Business. I just thought he got too slick at it and his shows became too much about him trying to top his guests.
If you loved him, fine. Obviously, a lot of people did and I'm curious to see what he does next. And maybe part of my problem is that there are just too many talk shows out there and too few variations between them.
Here's one of my favorite magicians, Shawn Farquhar, with a card trick. Shawn always seems to have a card trick…
The Atlantic has an important article up about William Barr and his refusal to go along with the myth — or as he is quoted as calling it, bullshit — that Donald Trump won the election. Here's a key excerpt from the piece by Jonathan D. Karl…
Barr also looked into allegations that voting machines across the country were rigged to switch Trump votes to Biden votes. He received two briefings from cybersecurity experts at the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. "We realized from the beginning it was just bullshit," Barr told me, noting that even if the machines somehow changed the count, it would show up when they were recounted by hand. "It's a counting machine, and they save everything that was counted. So you just reconcile the two. There had been no discrepancy reported anywhere, and I'm still not aware of any discrepancy."
Read the piece if you can. If you can't — The Atlantic has a weird paywall situation going there — at least read Alex Henderson summarizing it on Salon.
I came across some more photos I have of Steve, like this one of him with Jack Kirby…
…and I thought, "Hey, there's a good excuse to write more about Steve." It's been nice these days to see so much written about him on Facebook and other social media services. Everybody who knew him liked him. Everybody who'd heard of him but didn't know him wanted to know more about him.
When I first met Steve, he was what you'd call The Quiet Type. He didn't talk much. In our old Comic Book Club, that made him unique because the other twenty or thirty guys talked, usually loudly and all at the same time. He was usually there with his brother Gary — they were very close — and Gary was easily the more talkative of the two. It took me a while to appreciate that when Steve did talk, he almost always had something to say that was worth hearing.
The more we worked together, the more I came to appreciate that about him. At the club meetings, he'd sit and listen to everyone else — which was at times very entertaining — and he'd just enjoy the show. It's often harder to be a good listener than it is to be a good talker. And the more we worked together, the more Steve had to say…so before long, he was a good talker and a good listener. It's tough to master either of those skills, let alone both at the same time.
People just liked him and he was discerning enough to get some good ones into his life. The best was Diana, who was his wife for 23 years. They both chose well. Some of my longtime friends, when they selected mates, you'd look at the two of them together and think, "Oh, this is not a natural coupling." Steve himself once described another couple we knew as "a mix of oil and oilier." But with Steve and Diana, you could tell they were very, very good for each other. I wish we'd all gotten together more.
Here's a photo taken at my 60th birthday party. The gentleman at left is Bruce Simon, a great friend to both of us, and that's Steve in the middle. Bruce, Steve, Gary and I all went down to San Diego for the first San Diego Comic-Con — and I just figured it out: That was 50 years, 10 months and 24 days ago today…
The last time Steve and I talked at length not on the Internet — just the two of lunching alone — one topic was how so much we'd learned from Jack Kirby was beneficial in our lives. There was plenty there to discuss. Steve said the main lesson he'd learned was "Always be nice to every human being." Just to be a bit ornery, I named three people who we both felt had seriously wronged Jack and I asked, "Should he have been nice to them?"
Steve chuckled and said, "You forget! Anyone who harms Jack or cheats him immediately qualifies as not a human being!"
Diana has requested that those who wish to make a donation in Steve's honor direct that money to the place Steve would have wanted it to go. That would be the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center. Of course.
It's one of my favorite singers of the sixties (and the seventies and the eighties, etc…and my friend Shelly Goldstein and I even went to see her perform just a few years ago), Petula Clark. Here she is with her 1966 hit, "My Love"…