Category Archives: Obituaries

Sorry to hear of the passing of Leonard Stern…and most of the obits I'm reading aren't doing the man justice. He wasn't just "a writer for The Honeymooners and Get Smart." He produced Get Smart and he and his then-partner Sidney Zelinka wrote some of the best episodes of the classic Honeymooners series. They wrote the one where Ralph went on the game show and didn't know who wrote "Swanee River." They wrote the one where Ralph misunderstood a vet's report and thought he was dying. In fact, all the ones they wrote were pretty good.

And yes, Mr. Stern created the game "Mad Libs" and he did McMillan and Wife…but more important to me is that he created and/or produced a number of wonderful TV shows that didn't quite make it. Remember He and She with Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss? How about The Governor and J.J.? And whenever I ran into Mr. Stern (like this time), we always seemed to get to talking about I'm Dickens, He's Fenster. I'm sorry he didn't live to see its release on DVD because he obviously was very proud of that show. I would be too if I'd created and produced it. A good man…and I don't think I've ever heard anything bad about him, which is amazing for a guy who did as much as he did.

Veteran comic book artist and illustrator Lee J. Ames died last week at a nursing home in Huntington, New York at the age of 90. The cause of death was congestive heart failure.

Born in Manhattan, he began working for local art studios while still in high school. In 1939, he entered a contest the Disney organization was running to find new artists, won and briefly relocated to Los Angeles where he worked in a minor capacity on Fantasia and Pinocchio. But he got homesick, went back to the east and got into comics, working for Bernard Baily (who drew The Spectre and other strips for DC) and for the Eisner-Iger shop. Over the years, Ames worked for most of the major publishers including Timely, Archie, Harvey, Hillman and EC, and he was a major contributor to Classics Illustrated in the fifties.

In the sixties, he turned more to advertising and book work, enjoying immense success with a line of "how to draw" books. Many were in a series called the "Draw 50" series such as Draw Fifty People, Draw Fifty Vehicles, and Draw Fifty Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals. His last few decades were spent mostly producing those books and with lecture and teaching jobs that sprang from his many books.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Lee on a panel at the 2005 Comic-Con International in San Diego. He was a jolly man who clearly loved drawing and loved teaching others how to draw. It's always sad to lose someone like that.

Most of the comic book sites are noting the passing of Jeffrey Catherine Jones, a fine fantasy artist and occasional comic book illustrator who has left us at the age of 67. I admired the art but I'm afraid I have absolutely nothing of value to add to the public mourning. I met Jones in 1970 back when that talented person was a "he," we talked for about five minutes and that was it. Thereafter, he became one of the best in the field…then he became a she…and she got even better. The work, much of which you can see on this website, proves that well. Tom Spurgeon has a good obit and Michael Netzer has a good personal reminiscence.

I have no stories or insights. I never met him. I just enjoyed his work.

Did anyone ever have a longer, more varied career in show business than Jackie Cooper? Oh, yeah? Name him. You can't. A few others worked or have worked all their lives but no one topped him. As a kid, he was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor in 1931. You hear a lot about child stars who stop being stars once they stop being childs…but Jackie Cooper only stopped appearing in front of the cameras when he started appearing behind them. He was an Emmy-winning TV director as a grown-up and still an occasional actor.

I knew him first from his situation comedies, The People's Choice and Hennessy, and was then amazed to find out he was also in those "Our Gang" comedies I was watching on another channel. Always liked the guy and wish I had any sort of good personal anecdote to relate about him.

In perhaps the least-important thing he ever did in his long industry tenure, he directed an episode of the Superboy live-action series which I wrote. But it was shot in Florida and I didn't meet him then. (Didn't see the episode either but that's another story. I'm sure he did his usual fine, professional job.)

Within the last year or so, he was a guest at the Hollywood Collectors Show in Burbank, selling and signing autographed photos and memorabilia. I occasionally sat with Stan Freberg, who was placed right next to Mr. Cooper so I got to chat with him briefly — but never for very long since Cooper had a long, long line of folks waiting to meet him and get something signed. It was amazing how many of them were younger people who wanted to meet the man who played Perry White…and who were unaware of what, if anything else, he'd ever done. I think he liked talking to the few of us who knew what ever he'd ever done. It was an awful lot…so much so that it feels like "the rule of three" (i.e., celebrities die in threes) is in play here. Because that's about how many careers Jackie Cooper had…and they were all deservedly successful.

Bill Blackbeard was the the Founder and Director of the San Francisco Academy of Comics Art. What was that? Basically, it was a way for Bill Blackbeard to save old newspaper strips.

People were throwing them out, along with the old newspapers they were in. Libraries and other institutions were throwing them out. Bill saw the clear and present danger that the day would come when there would be no copies available of the classic strips…at least not in a location and condition that would be of any use to anyone. He loved that work and didn't want to see it vanish off the face of the planet…so he did what he did. Today, many wonderful comic strips are available and reprintable only because he did what he did.

Bill died March 10 in a Northern California nursing home, only a few weeks before what would have been his 85th birthday. R.C. Harvey has a longer, better obit than I am qualified to write. So does Jeet Heer. So does Tom Spurgeon.

Madelyn Davis wrote an awful lot of things for television besides all the things she wrote (or co-wrote with partner Bob Carroll Jr.) for Lucille Ball. She wrote and sometimes produced Alice and The Mothers-in-Law and many, many other popular programs. But just the episodes she and Bob and (usually) Jess Oppenheimer wrote for I Love Lucy were enough to get her into anyone's Hall of Fame. People give Lucy all or most of the credit…but Lucy didn't ad-lib those shows. The writers knew how to make them funny and to give her what she needed to be funny.

I met Madelyn a few times and helped out in the writing room of one of her shows for a few days. She was gracious and modest and very good at what she did. And what she did was to help entertain an awful lot of people for an awfully long time.

Arthur Marx was a champion tennis player, a journalist who wrote many books and articles about Hollywood, an accomplished playwright and a successful comedy writer. Oh, and he was also the son of Groucho Marx.

Whenever I got to talk with Arthur — which didn't happen as often as I would have liked — I always felt I had to make clear to him that I knew and respected his work, and that I wasn't just chatting with him because of his family tree. One time when the subject came up, he remarked that he was fortunate that he'd won all those awards for tennis when he was younger. It helped his self-esteem to have had a success that was all his own, that in no way could be credited to whose son he was.

At times, he looked like his father, sounded like his father and gave you the sense that sarcasm was hereditary. In some of his many books, he shared the benefits and problems of being the offspring not only of such a famous and revered man but also one who could be cold and acerbic, even towards his own kid. His first Marx-themed book, Life With Groucho, was an altogether flattering, loving look at his old man…but his old man objected to a couple of minor points and threatened to sue his son over them. No suit was ever filed but that's what happens when you have a father named Groucho.

Another downside is that people tend to assume you have the exact same skill set as your parent. Arthur did most of his screen and stage writing with a partner named Bob Fisher and reviewing one of their plays, a critic once assumed that all the weak jokes must have been written by Fisher because they could not possibly have been written by the son of Groucho. (In reponse, Arthur noted that the critic was almost surely comparing his and Fisher's work to Marx Brothers movie scripts written not by Groucho but by famous humorists like George S. Kaufman and S.J. Perelman.)

He had an odd relationship with Marx Brothers fans. He tried to accommodate the many questions and all the interest but he also wanted to protect the family name and a certain level of privacy. And while he knew an awful lot about the Brothers' careers and almost everything about their lives, he occasionally got a question he could not answer and had to turn to folks like me for answers. One time when he called me, I don't recall the question he asked but the answer was "Al Boasberg."

I took the above photo at an event in October of '09 at which U.S. postage stamps were unveiled of great TV icons. There was, of course, one of Groucho so Arthur was grumbling, mainly for comic effect, that he had to pay full price for a stamp with his father on it and they wouldn't give him a discount. I reminded him that unless and until they put out a series on Great Tax Collectors, I can't buy a stamp with my father on it at all. He chuckled, pointed at a large blowup image of the stamp which also included a photo of the duck from You Bet Your Life and said, "I shouldn't complain. They probably made the duck's kid pay double."

I really don't have much more to say about Sidney Lumet that John Farr doesn't say here…and say better than I could.

I do remember sitting in the Writers Guild Theater for the screening of Network. It was several weeks before its official premiere and going in, none of us knew much more about it than that it was Paddy Chayefsky and his "take" on television. I really like going to a movie on those terms, not having already read reviews and seen half of the film in talk show clips and commercials.

The film just blew us all away…all of us. By luck, I was seated next to Ray Bradbury. At the end of the film, there was a collective exhale from the audience and a long, sustaining burst of appreciative applause. Then Mr. Bradbury turned to me and said, "There isn't a person in this building who wouldn't kill his grandmother to have his name on a screenplay that good. Including me."

That was Chayefsky, not Lumet we were all envying. But obviously, no one would have felt that way if Lumet hadn't done his job about as well as it could be done. He was beaten out for the Oscar that year by John Avildsen for Rocky. I thought Network was not only a better film but a better-directed film. And Dog Day Afternoon, which is the film Lumet made just before Network, was better in every way than One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, for which he was beaten out by Milos Forman. In fact, Lumet was nominated as Best Director four times and he probably deserved to win at least two of those times instead of zero of those times. He was darned good at what he did.

Nope, no anecdotes about her. Never met her. Never had any particular feeling, one way or the other about her as an actress. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Sadly, what I think of when the name Elizabeth Taylor comes up is not any particular screen performance but the jokes: Jokes about her many marriages. Jokes about her diamonds. And after a certain point — I think when Joan Rivers decided there was money in them — jokes about her weight. When you're a celebrity, people do jokes about your failings or negatives and I admit to having written a number of them, though I don't think any about her.

But there sometimes comes a point where the jokes cross a line — in sheer volume if not insensitivity and content, and start to feel more like stomping on someone when they're vulnerable…and forgetting that that's an actual human being you're talking about. I thought a lot of the jokes about Ms. Taylor's girth or her marital exploits often went way beyond what was funny. A lot of Johnny Carson's longevity and general esteem came from his awareness of where the line was and when not to cross it. Like her friend Michael Jackson, there were times when she seemed to be an easy punch line and nothing else…and that was sad. In both cases.

So there was this man named Eddie Brandt…funny guy, very creative. Good musician. He mostly played piano for bandleaders who had a good sense of humor like Spade Cooley and Spike Jones. When that kind of music began to go out of vogue, a couple of Spike's band members wound up in animation, mostly at Hanna-Barbera, mostly in the editing department. Eddie was hired as a writer and he worked on a number of H-B shows in the sixties. He hated the work. He liked writing funny stuff but the folks at the network level were especially bad then with what they wanted and what they didn't want. They didn't want anything Eddie thought was funny…and sight unseen, without knowing any of the particulars, I can tell you that they were wrong and Eddie was right.

It is said that the show that drove him over the edge was Moby Dick, which H-B produced from 1967 to 1969. It was one of those shows that no one liked…not the people who made it nor the kids who watched it. Someone who was briefly a vice-president at CBS came up with the idea and Eddie had to make it work. At one point, he felt some sort of nervous, ulcerous collapse coming on and he walked off the show, out of the business and down to North Hollywood where he opened a store called Eddie Brandt's Saturday Matinee.

Originally, it was a memorabilia shop and you should have seen it in those days. It was crammed full of movie posters and stills and 16mm movies and books and animation art. Where did he get it all? To a large extent, it was a big garage sale for his friends in the music and cartoon businesses. Everyone Eddie knew — and he knew a lot of people — emptied their attics and closets and gave him stuff to sell. The great cartoon director Tex Avery supplied thousands of old animation drawings he had stashed in his garage. The first time I went into Eddie's shop, I bought 50 drawings and cels from old Avery MGM cartoons.

One time, he asked me, "Would you like to see an original Friz Freleng?" I said yes…and he took me over and introduced me to a short, older man. It was, of course, Friz Freleng. He was not for sale but I could (and did) buy a couple of Bugs Bunny cels that Friz had brought in for Eddie to sell. It was that kind of place.

Then it turned into another kind of place. Home video began coming out just about the time Eddie's sources of stuff to sell were drying up. He knew how big that business would be so he began stocking Betamax tapes. Then when VHS came out, he began stocking VHS…and he had everything. Everything. No movie was too obscure, no video company too small. Tapes you couldn't find anywhere else, you could find at Eddie Brandt's. If you were a film buff — especially if you liked weird, esoteric fare — it was the way you wanted every video store to be.

If you were lucky, you could find that film you always wanted to see again…or even for the first time. If you were really lucky, you got to talk to Eddie, who was full of facts and stories and always interesting…but you didn't see Eddie there a lot the last ten years. He increasingly retired and handed operations over to other members of his family. And then on February 20, he died at his home at the age of 89. He was a helluva guy and he leaves behind a helluva store — a place where movies are bought and rented by and to people who actually love movies.

Ed Rothhaar was a professor at San Bernardino Valley College who specialized in broadcasting and communications. He was also the longtime host of I Remember Television, which was seen for more than three decades on Public Television. (The show taped episodes for 22 years and then reran for a decade or so.) Before that, he was responsible for I Remember Radio, another long-running series with much the same premise. Ed would haul some old kinescope — or in the case of radio, tape — out of some archive or other and give it a new audience. He hosted with scholarly precision and resurrected some great treasures which might otherwise have gone unseen or unheard.

I used to see Ed at meetings of the Pacific Pioneer Broadcasters, a group to which we both belonged. He was professorial but approachable, ever eager to talk about old TV or old radio or even about new TV or new radio. He didn't have a lot of good things to say about new radio as I recall but noted how even the bad usages of the form were good usages on a certain level. And when I told him I liked a show of his I'd recently seen on KVCR here in Southern California, he was always quick to admit that he was just the host and that darn near all the credit should go to the people who made and appeared in the program he'd run. That was true…but we might not have ever seen that program if not for Ed. He died on Monday of heart failure at the age of 74.

We are shocked and saddened to hear of the death of comics and animation writer Dwayne McDuffie last night. He was reportedly undergoing a "surgical procedure" and suffered fatal complications. None of the sites reporting this seem to know how old he was but he was a young man in good shape with speaking engagements and personal appearances scheduled.

I didn't know Dwayne but he had a sterling reputation as both a writer and as a human being. Or at least if anyone ever didn't like him or his work, I sure never heard about it. Such a loss.

As you may have heard, Joanne Siegel — the wife of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel — has died at the age of 93.

Some said she was the model for Lois Lane, eventually if not at inception. She certainly had the courage and strength to face the deadliest menaces Lois ever encountered. That was in addition to the obvious beauty and charm. If you never met her, you missed meeting someone very special. If you did meet her…well, you know.

I want to write something longer about her but I think I need to collect my thoughts and finish a script that's due first. In the meantime, here's a link to a newspaper report.

Most of the obits will remember Kenneth Mars for two Germanic roles in Mel Brooks movies: Franz Liebkind, the Nazi author of the play in The Producers, and Inspector Kemp in Young Frankenstein. I remember him for those parts and so many others…like the neighbor on He and She, W.D. "Bud" Prize on Fernwood Tonight, the Stockbroker on the PBS production of Steambath and so many others. He was darn good in everything he did.

I guess Franz Liebkind was the role that put him on most folks' maps. He originally auditioned for the role of Roger DeBris, the crossdressing director. This was back when Mel was still figuring he might play the role of Franz himself. The day of the audition, they were running behind and Mars was in the waiting room long enough to read the entire script and to realize he was reading for the wrong role. He asked if he could audition for Franz, they let him…and boy, they couldn't have done better. What a perfect match of actor and part.

Ken did a lot of cartoon voice work so naturally, I had to book him for a Garfield cartoon. The day he came in, he had no idea what the role was. I told him, keeping as straight a face as possible, that I wasn't sure how to cast the part so since I respected him so much, I just decided to gamble that he could handle it. He asked, "What's so special about this part?" I told him, "Well, I'm really hoping you can do a German accent."

For about four seconds, he gave me a shocked look that screamed, "Don't you know who I am?" Then he got that I was kidding and he laughed.

And when he was done laughing, he asked me, "Which German accent? There are hundreds of them." He then proceeded to demonstrate about ten different ones with uncanny ability.

I couldn't choose among them but the part was that of a rocket scientist…so I asked him, "Where was Wernher von Braun from?" He told me and we agreed that would be it. His character had two assistants and as an inside joke, I named them Bialystock and Bloom…but the one line where he said the names was later cut for reasons of time.

He was, of course, absolutely flawless in the role, wringing everything an actor could wring out of every line. He was that way in everything he did. I don't think I ever saw him be bad in anything. Next time you watch The Producers, watch him…and yes, I know it's hard to do when you have Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in the scenes, pulling focus, fighting for your attention. But Ken Mars scored with every single syllable he uttered in that movie and there isn't a false beat in a spoken word or a word of body language. He's a big reason that movie became a cinema classic.