B. Monte read what I wrote about how Jonathan Winters didn't appear that often with Johnny Carson even though those appearances always went well…
I can think of one reason that might explain why Johnny didn't have Jonathan on more often.
You have written about how Johnny tightly controlled the show and that almost every impromptu story and surprise stunt was pre-approved. While the Winters segments were very entertaining, I can imagine that Carson had a love/hate relationship with having Winters on the show — they were great segments, but Johnny had no control over what would happen (and had no chance of regaining control).
I dunno. Johnny had Rodney Dangerfield on as often as he could get him and Rodney was pretty much on auto-pilot. If you watched Rodney on talk shows, he came out with a list in his head of the jokes he wanted to tell and the order he was going to tell them. A host could knock him off his script by trying to get him to not go straight on to the next one. All Johnny would do was to interject a quick question like, "Have you seen your doctor lately?" and Rodney would say, since the doctor jokes came later, "I'm going to the doctor later" and plunge right into the next joke on the list.
Other hosts tried to actually participate in Rodney's "act" and to actually interview him. It killed his rhythm. And Johnny did the same thing in that clip with Jonathan: just laid back and let the guest soar. He also did it when Robin Williams was on and he let guests like Charles Grodin control the conversation if the audience was laughing.
One of the things Carson learned from Jack Benny — one of the things that kept Johnny on the air for so long — was the principle that if the audience is laughing and it's your show, it doesn't matter who's getting the laughs. Benny let Don Wilson get the laughs. He let Dennis Day get the laughs. He let Mary Livingstone, Mel Blanc, Frank Nelson and all the others — and especially Rochester — get the laughs. Johnny loved it when a Don Rickles or a Mel Brooks got on a roll.
And you can see how delighted he was with Jonathan in that clip. I'm wondering if Jonathan didn't resent what The Tonight Show paid and turned down requests to come on the program…and only accepted them every so often when he felt the need to remind the industry that he was still around and still funny.
Then again, the guy loved to perform. I once saw him do 20 minutes for customers in a Honeybaked Ham shop on Riverside Drive. So like I said…I dunno.
This turned up on Max Maven's Twitter feed this morning…
I made my life about words, reading them and writing them. I wish I had a more elegant way of telling you all that I love you.
I had a good run, made wonderful friends, shared many laughs, and I learned a great many things. I learned that magic allows us to be so much bigger than we are. I learned we should be kind to one another and forgive people for being flawed and prideful.
The one thing I know is that we can all do better, and I think we will.
Elon Musk will probably try to charge Max's ghost for this.
Later this month, the acclaimed production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish will reopen at the off-Broadway New World Stages on West 50th Street in New York. I know about eight words of Yiddish but I think I also know Fiddler on the Roof — on stage and screen — well enough to know what the actors are saying up there.
It's not my favorite musical and it might not even make my Top Ten…but I'm fascinated with the fact that this show, which its makers felt would have a limited run playing only to a niche market, has been the worldwide, universal success it's been. They never thought it would play in any city without a hefty Jewish population but before long, it was a smash hit in Japan, for God's sake! And everywhere else.
Even after it opened on Broadway in 1964, they didn't know. Zero Mostel was the first Tevye and when his initial contract was nearing expiration, he demanded a huge increase to stay on, confident the producers knew that he was the show and that it would close quickly without him. They said no and after he left, it ran another seven years and has had six Broadway revivals since then. It may be the most-produced musical of all time.
Here's a little video of rehearsals for the reopening. All the things the actors say about how universal it is and how it speaks to everyone — that's all true but when the show was first produced, no one suspected that. They just thought it would run until every theater-loving Jew within commuting distance of Manhattan had seen it…
Someone asked me recently what Jonathan Winters was like off-camera. In my experiences, he was very much like Jonathan Winters on-camera. For some of the time I had an office at Hanna-Barbera, I was located right outside the recording studio and when a Smurfs voice session ended, Mr. Winters would go prowling in search of an audience. He learned he could often find one in my office where other writers were known to congregate. I didn't go into the studio every day but for a while, I would try to be there when The Smurfs was recording, just in case Jonathan was in and wanted to play.
There'd be three or four writers in my office and when he poked his head in, we'd never greet him by name. I'd say, "Hi! Are you the local game warden" or something like that…and Jonathan would instantly become the local game warden and commence a lecture about how to not have a bear eat your face off. Once in a while when he was Jonathan Winters and not a character, he would tell show biz stories. The ones I recall best were the ones that expressed his distaste for Bob Hope…
…and when you think about it, he and Hope were pretty much opposites. Jonathan could not work with pre-scripted lines and cue cards while Hope — at that age — couldn't perform without them.
Here's Jonathan on with Johnny Carson. The date is 12/8/1988 and I doubt you'll ever see anyone do better sitting in Carson's guest chair…and you can see the delight on Johnny's face throughout. And yet I wondered why he didn't have Jonathan on very often. Winters at the time was living in Toluca Lake, I think…literally about a five-minute drive from where Johnny taped. And Jonathan was rarely unavailable. You'd think that when a guest scored this well, Johnny would tell his people, "Let's have that guy on every three or four weeks." But I'd be surprised if Jonathan was on more often than once every other year or so.
Earlier today, I told reader-of-this-site Kevin Krieg that some of the old Warner Brothers TV shows he yearned to see were on the MeTV+ Channel and that a letter-writing campaign might get them to pick up Sugarfoot. Well, apparently my post today was so effective that it prompted all you folks to write in letters weeks ago because they are running Sugarfoot at times…and all the other shows Kevin asked about seem to be on some channel somewhere. Just Google and ye shall find.
Max Maven died last night surrounded by friends…and he had many. Max was one of the smartest people I ever had the pleasure of knowing. People called him a "Walking Encyclopedia of Magic" and he was that but he also knew an awful lot about other topics. He performed as a "mentalist," a kind of magic I usually find very phony and demeaning to the audience but Max's act was anything but that. It presupposed that we were smart enough to grasp concepts, not that we were dumb enough to believe someone could read minds. He invented some of the best tricks, including one that was in my repertoire back when I did magic for friends and before I had ever met Max.
He was also one of the few magicians who could pull off those photos of looking mystic and perhaps Satanic without looking silly. That had a lot to do with his commanding presence, his eloquence as a speaker and the fact that deep down, he was just a wonderful human being. Everyone in the magic community knew him and trusted him. From time to time, two magicians would get into a quarrel over whether a given effect was proprietary (the moral property of someone) or public domain. Often, those arguments would be settled by asking Max to play Judge Judy. And everyone would accept his judgement because he was wise and honest and he would probably be embarrassed by what I'm writing here so I'll tone it down.
He'd been ill and in frequent isolation for some time. I called him a few times, most recently about two weeks ago. In years past, a conversation with Max could last an hour — and that would have been one of the shorter ones. But in that last chat, he oh-so-politely got off the phone in five minutes. That's how bad-off he was. If you'd like to actually eavesdrop on a conversation of ours that lasted close to two hours, there's one online.
His website has a much better overview of his life and career than I could possibly assemble for you. I just wanted you to know how much this man was respected and admired and loved. If and when there's a memorial service, it's gonna be jammed. And it won't surprise me if he has left us something that we could believe was a message from beyond.
Why did Filmation decide to do live action Saturday morning shows in the mid 1970s? I know they had done animation/live action hybrids (like Fat Albert) in the early 1970s. So why do things like Ghost Busters and the other shows?
Because CBS (or any network) wanted them and the guys at Filmation thought they could make money doing them. And I think also there's that "don't put all your eggs in one basket" principle. If any network were to suddenly think, "Let's buy less animation and more live-action," most cartoon studios didn't want to be shut out.
The first two sales I ever made to Hanna-Barbera were both live-action projects…and for a while after that, I couldn't get them to give me work on the cartoons because Joe Barbera thought of me as a live-action writer. At that time — it changed now and then — he felt live-action writers kind of automatically didn't know how to write for animation. Once he was convinced I could do both, I was a candidate for more work than if I could only do one. At the same time, he was trying to convince the networks that his studio could do both…for the same reason.
And I should also mention: Some folks in the industry who'd scold you if you said animation isn't "real television" or "real movies" the way live-action is quietly harbor a longing to work in live-action. There can be more money and more prestige and it feels glamorous to be on the set which a whole crew and actors and everything. That's some folks, not all.
Steven Elworth wants to know…
When Jack Kirby moved from Marvel to DC, did work for both overlap?
In 1970 when Jack left Marvel for DC, he sent in (from California) an issue of Fantastic Four, waited until it had arrived at the Marvel offices in New York, then phoned Stan Lee and told him it was his last issue and that he'd signed with DC. He did no more work for Marvel until 1975 when his DC contract expired and he returned to Marvel. In '75, he sent off what DC knew was his last issue of Kamandi and then started fulfilling his new Marvel contract the next day.
This gets some readers confused if they don't realize that all the comics that come out in one month weren't all written and drawn in the same month. Sometimes, one book is way ahead of another in production.
In '70 when Jack quit Marvel, they had several issues of Fantastic Four and Thor by him that were still going through the process of scripting, lettering, inking and coloring. They also had stories of The Inhumans Jack had written and drawn for a book called Amazing Adventures and a couple of Ka-Zar stories he'd drawn for Astonishing Tales, plus a couple short ghost-type stories for their fantasy comics and some covers for various titles. Most of this was released before any of his DC material hit newsstands but Marvel could have held some of it until later — and did with one Kirby issue of Fantastic Four — and DC could have released his new books for them earlier if they'd wanted to.
So there could have been a real overlap but it would not have been because Jack was working for both companies at the same time. He didn't. The overlap could have come from the publishers' decision of when to publish material they had on hand.
These two Kirby comics went on sale at about the same time but one was done months before the other.
When Jack went back to Marvel in '75, DC had six or seven completed issues of Kamandi by Jack on the shelf and I think one or two of Our Fighting Forces. So there was an overlap there, not in terms of when Jack did the work but because of when the publishers published things. After he did his last Kamandi, he was assigned a batch of covers for various Marvel titles and he did several issues of Captain America and a lot more covers before they had him do anything else.
This is also the answer to the question someone asked me as to why Joe Kubert did the covers on the last seven issues of Kamandi by Jack. Covers then were done whenever Carmine Infantino — the publisher but he also supervised cover designs — got around to them. In this case, by the time he did, Jack was no longer working for DC.
For about six months, new Kirby work was coming out from both publishers, which might have made some think he was simultaneously working for both firms. But he wasn't.
Lastly, Kevin Krieg wrote to ask…
Enjoying high quality B&W prints of Rawhide and Wagon Train on INSP. Do you have any insight on why classic WB shows (77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye, Surfside Six, Sugarfoot, Maverick, Colt 45, Lawman, etc.) are never shown anywhere?
77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian Eye and Lawman are all running currently on MeTV+. Here's a PDF of their current schedule.) I would imagine that channel may pick up some of the others when they feel some of their current offerings are losing audience shares.
When there's discussion of some channel picking up the reruns of some old series, there are two questions, one being whether the channel thinks its viewers will tune in to see the show. Some programs simply rerun better than others. Some programs have some appeal for that purpose because they haven't been seen in a while.
The other question then becomes whether the outfit that owns the show can provide decent prints or all or most of its episodes. Sometimes, they can't. I don't know if the situation has changed but a few years ago, whoever owns My Living Doll did not have decent copies of about half the episodes. It can cost a lot of money to restore shows for rerun purposes and there are probably a lot of old shows where they don't have decent prints and/or don't think it's worth the investment to restore what they have.
I think though Kevin that the shows you're asking about may all be available if/when someone wants to run them. Years ago, I used to say that writing with programming suggestions to CBS, NBC and ABC was a waste of time. They were reaching so many viewers than the interests of a few didn't matter to them. But these days, a lot of cable channels — the kind that run the kind of shows that interest you — might be highly responsive to a few dozen letters. If you can get rally enough Sugarfoot fans to write in, it might make a difference.
Speaking of Freedom of Speech — as we were — here's Devin Stone (aka The Legal Eagle) talking about a case that will be of interest to those of you who practice the kind of Free Speech known as "parody." It's twenty minutes but you may find it's worth it…
I finished the script I had to finish. Here's a tip for those of you who struggle with this: I've found there sometimes comes a point of fatigue — both physical and mental — where I need to stop and sleep. Earlier in my career, I thought it was heroic to stay up all night, soldiering through, not giving in to the demands of my brain and body. I eventually learned that while that made me feel noble on some level, I was not writing very fast and I was not writing very well. If, however, I slept…well, then when I woke up I would do better work and get more done per hour.
So last night, I wrote 'til I reached that fatigue point and then I slept five hours — which is about what I usually sleep — and when I got up, I not only felt more competent at what I was doing, I went back and rewrote much of what I wrote in the last hour or so before I knocked off last night.
There are times when you can't do that; when the work absolutely has to be in before you go beddy-bye. But when you can stop and renew your energy, it helps to do that. It took me way too long to learn this.
I'm not following politics much these days. I'm especially avoiding articles that purport to tell us what the outcome will be of the voting next week because it's fairly clear to me that everyone's projections and predictions are all over the place this time. All you can say with any confidence is that a lot of those pieces will be proven wrong.
Still, I couldn't help following the story about the man who broke into the home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and physically battered her husband Paul, intending to do worse to Ms. Pelosi if and when she came home. It was shocking someone did that and it was shocking how rapidly a certain section of the public came up with a completely bogus counter-narrative.
San Francisco Police Chief William Scott said, "There is absolutely no evidence that Mr. Pelosi knew this man. As a matter of fact the evidence indicates the exact opposite." Now, I wouldn't suggest taking anything any police officer says as inarguable truth but at least, his officers were in the house to arrest the assailant, they interrogated him, they investigated his past, etc. The counter-narrative was just made up by some folks who for political reasons, wanted the real story not to be the real story. They weren't there. They never knew the attacker. I can't see where they had any more information than I would if I announced what you ate for dinner last night.
And then many people felt justified at spreading this phony explanation because "Some people are saying that…"
"Some people" saying something does not mean there's any truth in the matter. "Some people" are saying Martians walk among us and that Elvis and J.F.K. Junior are alive. "Some people" even think cole slaw is edible.
Elon Musk even spread a little of the baseless counter-narrative, then thought better and deleted the Tweet in which he spread it. This man is now in control of Twitter, pledging a new era of Free Speech. I believe in Free Speech but a lot of people who say they do only really believe in it when it accomplishes something for them. I have the feeling I'm not going to be on Twitter much longer.
"Hey, Evanier," no one has said to me lately, "What's your friend Frank Ferrante doing these days?" Well, he's as busy as ever, of course. I refer you to the photo at above left…and no, he's not a bellhop now. He's in character as Forte, a bellhop who serves as the host of "Luminaire," the popular dinner show from Cafe Zazou. Cafe Zazou is not unlike Teatro Zinzanni, the long-running producer of similar dinner shows, many of which have featured Frank in the past.
"Luminaire" is performed in Chicago in an exquisite setting and what you do is you buy tickets for it here, then on the night of your tickets, you and your companion(s) get a little dressed-up and you go for an evening of fine food and fine entertainment with Frank Forte as your Master of Ceremonies. There are jugglers and acrobats and music and comedy and audience participation…and I haven't seen this production but I saw Frank do this in San Francisco and the reviews here are even better.
He's there through the end of April and if I can overcome my reticence to get on a plane before then, I'm going to go back and have what I'm sure will be a wonderful time.
And before you ask: No, he is not forsaking his role Groucho Marx in his one-man-and-a-piano-player show, An Evening With Groucho. Yes, it's the one I've been touting on this blog for decades now. If you saw the show broadcast recently on PBS, you're probably dying to see it in person now…and you can if you're near Chicago on the evening of November 22. Frank's using his night off from "Luminaire" to do his Groucho show in the same room and tickets are available from the same place. If I were back there then, I'd go see him one night in one show and the next night in the other…kind of a Ferrante double-header.
This is my almost-annual post about why I don't like Halloween. Each year when I do run it, I make a few updates and changes but if you've read it in the past, you already know…
At the risk of coming off like the Ebenezer Scrooge of a different holiday, I have to say: I've never liked Halloween. For one thing, I'm not a big fan of horror movies or of people making themselves up to look disfigured or like rotting corpses. One time when I was in the company of Ray Bradbury at a convention, someone shambled past us looking like they just rose up from a grave and Ray said something about how people parade about like that to celebrate life by mocking death. Maybe to some folks it's a celebration of life but to me, it's just ugly.
I've also never been comfy with the idea of kids going door-to-door to take candy from strangers. Hey, what could possibly go wrong with that? I did it a few years when I was but a child, not so much because I wanted to but because it seemed to be expected of me. I felt silly in the costume and when we went to neighbors' homes and they remarked how cute we were…well, I never liked to be cute in that way. People talk to you like you're a puppy dog. The man two houses down…before he gave me my treat, I thought he was going to tell me to roll over and beg for it.
When I got home, I had a bag of "goodies" I didn't want to eat. In my neighborhood, you got a lot of licorice and Mounds bars and Jordan Almonds, none of which I liked even before I found out I was allergic to them. I would say that a good two-thirds of the candy I hauled home on a Halloween Eve went right into the trash can and I felt bad about that. Some nice neighbor had paid good money for it, after all.
And some of it, of course, was candy corn — the cole slaw of sugary treats. Absolutely no one likes candy corn. Don't write to me and tell me you do because I'll just have to write back and call you a liar. No one likes candy corn. No one, do you hear me?
I wonder if anyone's ever done any polling to find out what percentage of Halloween candy that is purchased and handed-out is ever eaten. And I wonder how many kids would rather not dress up or disfigure themselves for an evening if anyone told them they had a choice. Where I live, they seem to have decided against trick-or-treating. In earlier versions of this essay, I used to say, "Each year, I stock up and no one comes. For a while there, I wound up eating a couple big sacks of leftover candy myself every year." But I haven't had anyone at my door for three or four years now so I don't bother.
So I didn't like the dress-up part and I didn't like the trick-or-treating part. There were guys in my class at school who invited me to go along on Halloween when they threw eggs at people and overturned folks' trash cans and redecorated homes with toilet paper…and I never much liked pranks. One year the day after Thanksgiving, two friends of mine were laughing and bragging how they'd trashed some old lady's yard and I thought, "That's not funny. It's just being an a-hole."
Over the years, as I've told friends how I feel, I've been amazed how many agree with me. In a world where people now feel more free to say that which does not seem "politically correct," I feel less afraid to own up to my dislike of Halloween. About the only thing I ever liked about it was the second-best Charlie Brown special.
So that's why I'll be home for Halloween and not up in West Hollywood wearing my Ted Cruz costume. I'm fine with every other holiday. Just not this one. I do not believe there is a War on Christmas in this country. That's just something the Fox News folks dreamed up because they believe their audience needs to be kept in a perpetual state of outrage about something. But if there's ever a War on Halloween, I'm enlisting. And bringing the eggs.
From a vintage episode of The Carol Burnett Show, here's the famous dentist sketch with Harvey Korman and Tim Conway. I'm trying to think of another performer who had their name in the title of an hour-long variety show who would have allowed a 9+ minute sketch that they weren't in on their show. I imagine Dean Martin would have said, "Great! That's nine minutes I don't have to work!" But I can't think of anyone else who wouldn't have fired a producer who suggested such a thing…
Oh, wait. I just thought of someone. The two women who were billed as Pink Lady would have said — in broken English — "Fine. Can you leave us out of the other fifty-one minutes too and let us go back to Japan?"
My pal Sergio and I have an almost-every-night phone conversation around Midnight. That's when we both like to work and things are quiet at our respective homes. I moved us up to 10 PM last night because I'm battling a mid-level cold and what works for me is lotsa water and lotsa sleep — preferably not at the same time. So I went to bed around 10:30 and was awakened an hour later by a call from my credit card company. It seems one of my credit cards decided to go on an all-out spending spree without me.
This has happened before and when one does, that card becomes a victim of Cancel Culture. A new card with a new number will be dispatched to me tout de suite.
Much of this process was arranged with me "talking" to robo-people but one matter came up which required them to connect me with an Actual Human Being. These days, I'm sometimes surprised that some companies employ any. The person or persons using my credit card info made about six charges on it in about fifteen minutes.
I asked the Actual Human Being who was on the line with me, "Just out of curiosity, how much of the merchandise they charged did they get away with? The A.H.B. said, "None of it. They were all mail orders. Those things never ship immediately and certainly not at this hour on a Saturday night. There was plenty of time to freeze the orders and check with the cardholder and then cancel the orders. The merchandise never left whatever shelf it was on."
She went on: "People who use stolen credit cards or stolen credit card numbers in retail stores often get away with their fake purchases. By the time our computers get suspicious and check with the cardholder, the customers are out the door and on their way with the loot. But we're getting better and better at stopping online credit card fraud of this kind."
I asked her why people still attempt it with online orders when the majority of the time, they don't get away with it. She replied, "I guess because a lot of people are stupid."
I'm going to remember that. I think it's the answer to more questions in my life than I've realized.
