• The world got a look tonight at what the Oscars would look like if they were produced by Vince McMahon.

Regarding the previous post, Andy Rose wrote to ask…

Your Carson video with Lance Burton got me watching a whole bunch of other videos of him doing the same performance many times over the next couple of decades, but with a noticeably evolving stage presence. Burton gradually goes from a somewhat vampire-like appearance to a much more standard-looking formal costume and hairstyle. He also changes from staring at the audience in a slightly unsettling way to engaging the audience with more of a pleasant grin and a wink.

My question: Did Burton deliberately change because the magician-as-madman look was starting to go out of style in the 80s, or is his evolution just the sign of a performer who naturally got more comfortable on stage as the years went on?

I think most magicians of his era started getting away from that creepy-guy-in-a-tux look…a style change that a lot to do with David Copperfield dressing like a "today" man and with Penn & Teller ridiculing old stereotypes of magic. But I believe Burton only ever took that posture for that dove/cigarette act and as soon as he was in venues that called for longer shows, he got out of that mode (and the tux) once he'd made his last dove appear or disappear in the opener.

He was and still is a very charming, funny guy from Kentucky and once his act ran past ten minutes, as it did when he began headlining in Vegas, he needed to connect more with his audience and, of course, talk. I don't think it was that he got more comfy on stage. I think it was that more was expected of him. One of the appeals of his Vegas shows was how likeable and friendly he was on stage.

I know I've written about this before here but I became a tremendous fan of Mr. Burton when he had a show at the old Hacienda Hotel, more or less across the street from the Tropicana in Vegas. He followed a Minsky's Burlesque presentation that occupied that showroom for many years. I saw that a couple of times because it starred two actual Minsky's veteran comics, Dexter Maitland and Irv Benson…the last of their kind. When Burton took over the hall, I recognized several of the old sets repainted and repurposed for his show.

It was a wonderful show which substituted ingenuity and hard work for the big budget they didn't have. The hard work included how long Burton was on stage for each performance — and he did two shows a night, plus sometimes a meet-and-greet signing program books for the audience outside. He was on stage for about 75% of the show, spelled briefly by a novelty act (usually the brilliant juggler, Michael Goudeau) or a number by six lovely dancers. The dancers were topless at the late show, covered at the early show.

Burton had a huge budget when he moved to the Lance Burton Showroom at the Monte Carlo and there were other magic shows nearby with huge, expensive tricks and special effects. I've still never enjoyed a magic show in that town as much as I enjoyed Burton's run at the Hacienda. I think the tickets were $19.95 each and it was not hard to find $5 off coupons. I got to know one of the ladies in the show and she got me in for the full $19.95 off, plus backstage.

When he moved to the bigger theater down the Strip, a lot of intimacy was lost…and while the tricks got more elaborate, a few of them were like most of those in Siegfried and Roy's show. By that I mean you had the feeling that the magic was being done not by the magician but by the folks who build the illusions and by the stage crew pulling levers and pushing buttons. Lance still opened with his dove act but it was a shorter version and at some point, he began talking during it, which I think distracted from the fact that he was up there doing some of the best sleight-of-hand in the world.

I liked the show…and I guess I liked the fact that Burton was not working as hard and probably making eight times the money or more. I just liked the show at the Hacienda more and not because the dancers had their bras off. I liked that you were seeing one of the best magicians ever doing it the hard way. He's semi-retired now and contributing his time to help and encourage young magicians. I don't know anyone in the magic community who doesn't admire the man…and as I think you've figured out by now, I do too.

We've all heard stories about how a young, largely-unknown stand-up comic went on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, did well, got some signal of approval from Carson and, the next day, that young comic had a different, highly successful career. These days, no one appearance on any show — possible occasional exception: America's Got Talent — has anywhere near the star-making power of a thumbs-up from The King of Late Night.

The power of The Tonight Show was actually fading in Johnny's last years on that beat. The rise of channels like HBO, Showtime and Comedy Central, and a flurry of new talk and comedy shows opened up new paths to stardom. Success in stand-up comedy also changed from getting your own sitcom (Seinfeld, Carey, Prinze) to packing huge auditoriums (Hart, Chapelle, Burr). Six good minutes on a talk show where you can't use the "f" word ain't that much help filling stadiums.

But for a few years there, Carson had star-making power…and it wasn't just for comedians.

In 1981, 21-year-old Lance Burton was winning awards for his magic, most notably for a wordless 12-minute routine in which he made cards, doves, candles and other items appear and disappear to Vivaldi's "Four Seasons." His breakthrough came on October 28th of that year when he appeared on Carson's show.

As the story is told, Burton came in that afternoon and did his entire 12-minute routine in rehearsal so that the show's producers could select the six-or-so minutes that he'd perform on that evening's show. But Johnny, himself a fan and practitioner of magic — came down to watch that rehearsal and when it was over, he said, "Let's have him do the whole thing."

When Freddie Prinze did his first stand-up spot with Johnny, he got five-and-a-half minutes. Burton got twice that much and, obviously, the biggest possible endorsement from Mr. Carson. The magician was instantly flooded with offers and he selected headlining the "Folies Bergere" show at the Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas. He stayed there for nine years and could have stayed longer except that he moved across the street to the Hacienda to headline his own show. Then that led to him having his own showroom at the Monte Carlo for the next 26 years.

I saw him many times in Vegas and even got to hangout backstage. He always started each performance with some version of this routine which he did on the Carson show. A lot of magicians would tell you it is the all-time best of its kind…

Like most (all?) of you, I'm not watching the Academy Awards tomorrow night. Haven't even set the ol' TiVo, though I might just in case I hear about one or two memorable moments. Then again, if there are any, they'll be viewable a hundred places on the Internet by Midnight so maybe I needn't bother.

That's one reason why a record low number of folks tune in the ceremony with each passing year. If you scan the 'net for articles, you can probably find eight dozen other reasons, all of them valid to some degree. At the top of my list would be that people these days are more conscious than ever of the financial end of films. Once you know that Will Smith got $40,000,000 for starring in King Richard, it's hard to get that excited over whether he wins or loses as Best Actor. Is anyone going to feel sorry for him if he doesn't?

There's also a certain pomp, circumstance and phoniness to watch all these rich, famous people giving honors to each other. No matter how humble some of the speeches try to be, there's always that air of Jerry Lewis explaining how people in show business are the greatest human beings and so are deserving of more reverence.

I think also in the era of videogames and YouTube and all the other forms of entertainment we now have, movies are just not as important. They also don't have the sense of timeliness they once had. We're all aware: Every movie we want to see will always be there. I don't have to go to theaters — increasingly, even movie lovers don't — and I don't have to see them now. I have not seen any — not a one — of the Marvel movies since the first X-Men film. If and when I want to, I can. Most people don't watch The Tony Awards because they haven't seen any of the nominated shows. It's becoming the same way with the Oscars.

And I could go on and on about this until some orchestra plays me off. I just think that for the last decade or three, the world has steadily been losing interest in awards ceremonies. We heard a lot about how one host might attract more viewers than another, or how one ceremony wasn't as well-produced as another.

In hindsight, I think it's easier to see that those concerns were ignoring the core issue: People have just lost their interest in this kind of thing, just like they lost interest in beauty pageants. And westerns on TV. And Playboy magazine. And Donkey Kong and water beds and Cabbage Patch Dolls and circuses and video rental shops and Toys R Us and a long, long list of other things we could all itemize. At the very least, we have matters to think about that impact us more.

For those of you unfamiliar with this centuries-old Internet Custom that I invented and which no one else follows, the posting of a picture of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup on a blog means the blogger has a busy day and may not be able to post much, if anything today. It is an advisory to you that you might want to go see if there are any sites other than this one on the World Wide Web. I hear there are.

You may enjoy this…

• The Senate hearings remind me that folks who complain mightily about "judicial activism" or "legislating from the bench" are complaining about the results, not the activism itself. They think it's great when it gives them a desired outcome.

Hey, let's talk about Stan Berman, a cab driver from Brooklyn who attained a smidgen of fame in the early sixties as a "crasher." He went to parties and weddings and important public functions without a ticket or invite but with a lot of chutzpah, cleverness and occasionally a tuxedo. And we can start this discussion by watching his appearance on an episode of I've Got a Secret that aired on 2/12/62…

You'll notice Mr. Berman is very evasive and often absolutely wrong with his answers to the panelists' questions. I suspect this was a habit he picked up in all those event-crashings. He seemed to have learned to be evasive and to lie when asked anything. (Another interesting point: His New York Times obit said that he also sometimes worked as a private investigator.)

Want to know more about Stan? Donald Liebenson has written a fine article about him for Vanity Fair. But Liebenson missed one of Stan's greatest moments. MAD did an article in its December, 1962 issue called "Celebrities' Home Movies" in which various celebs — John Wayne, Alfred Hitchcock, Lloyd Bridges and others — narrated brief snippets of their home movies. The last one was Stan Berman and here are the first two and last two panels of it…

That was drawn by Wally Wood, the subject of much discussion on this blog lately. A year or two later, he got himself bounced out of MAD — not entirely to his regret — and wound up wandering over to Marvel Comics. It does not look like he had much if any reference on what Stan Berman looked like.

The timing on this intrigued me the way some odd things intrigue me. The December '62 MAD would have gone on sale around October so it went to press around late August. Back-timing further, it seems possible that Larry Siegel and/or Arnie Kogen, who were credited as writers of the MAD piece, saw that I've Got a Secret episode and it gave them the idea to include Berman. Larry's no longer with us but I just got off the phone with Arnie.

He only vaguely remembers it but he said, "I'm pretty sure I didn't see that I've Got a Secret. I think I read about him somewhere. I probably wrote the article and then they asked Larry to add more material to it but I think I was the one who put that guy into it."

I don't know how I feel about that guy. You could view him as a prankster, I guess. You could also consider all the meals he ate that others paid for, and shows he went to that others paid to attend. I mean, there's a certain amount of thievery in what he did, and he did sometimes disrupt public events. I know people who are sad that they can't afford — or can but are unable to get badges — for Comic-Con in San Diego. How should we feel about the people who sneak in?  I don't admire them or write them off as harmless.

Like me, you've probably had times when at some event, overzealous security personnel tried to keep you out of someplace you were supposed to be. I once had to practically fight my way into a building at Comic-Con to get to a Jack Kirby Tribute Panel I was supposed to be hosting in three minutes. I had the proper badge with the big GUEST ribbon on it but the guy thought I was trying to cut the line to get into Hall H, which is not at all where I was headed in such a hurry.

Every time that happens to us, we can "thank" people who crash and sneak their way into things for it. And on I've Got a Secret, he bragged about crashing some strangers' wedding and kissing the bride. I wonder if that recently-married couple was watching the show that night and how they felt about his "hobby."

And yet in my youth, I occasionally "crashed" (I guess you'd say) a TV or movie studio and went where I had no permission to be. I think I even helped myself to a donut from the craft services table at a Laugh-In taping at NBC. It's not exactly the same thing but it's close. I wonder how the I've Got a Secret people who put Stan Berman on their show and sort of glorified what he did would have felt about someone crashing their security.

And also,  there's this: The game show treated it as a kind of admirable accomplishment that Berman was able to crash the inauguration of President Kennedy and get into the presidential seating area. Would that have seemed so harmless and fun after 11/22/63? He probably couldn't have done it after that and maybe that's a good thing.

Operating on the assumption there will be an actual, for real, people-gathering-in-person Comic-Con International in San Diego this July, we announce the annual call for nominations for the annual Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. In truth, we have plenty of nominations from the past and all will be considered by the judges for this year's two awards. But if you have a new name to throw out for conversation, this is the time to throw it.

This is an award for a body of work as a comic book writer…someone who is or was unrecognized and/or unrewarded for that body of work. It is not for your favorite artist. It is not for someone who wrote a few stories. It is not for someone whose talents have been honored over and over.

It is not for someone who got very, very rich and/or famous writing comics. And the posthumous one is not for someone who is alive. The last two years, we only did posthumous awards and you'd be amazed at the number of people who, for reasons I cannot fathom, nominated writers who were still among the living. One such very-much-alive writer was nominated by his agent who I guess didn't know what the word "posthumous" meant…or maybe he just hadn't talked to his client in a real long time or thought the guy was looking kinda unhealthy.

It is also not for anyone who has received this award in the past. The full list of such people can be read over on this page.

Here's the address for nominations. They will be accepted until April 1 — a shorter span than in years past — at which time all reasonable suggestions will be placed before our Blue Ribbon Judging Committee and we'll pick six names to add to the hallowed ranks. Thank you.

And here's another number from that London production of 42nd Street. In it, you can briefly see the characters of Maggie Jones and Bert Barry, who wrote the musical being produced, Pretty Lady, and who also play character roles in it. Maggie sings the lead on "Shuffle Off to Buffalo" in the second act and they both pop up in other numbers.

I remember when I first saw the show, it seemed like they were based loosely on Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who wrote a lot of musicals and also appeared sometimes in them. And in the four or five times I've seen this show staged since then, it always struck me that the folks playing Maggie and Bert were kinda playing Sally Rogers and Buddy Sorrell…

Joe Frank wrote to ask about the teaming of Jack Kirby as penciler and Wally Wood as inker at Marvel in the sixties…

Questions about Kirby/Wood inks pre-Fourth World. He had instances of Jack and Wally coming together, at mid-'60s Marvel, on some very impressive covers.

But not on the stories. He inked Jack's Daredevil figures in Fantastic Four #39. He inked the Odin/Absorbing Man cover to Journey Into Mystery #122. But no full tales on those books. Was Stan not impressed with their previous collaborations? Or did he prefer to use Wally over other pencilers?

If not for starting the Tower line, would Wally have been okay just inking others as needed?

Well, first you have to remember that Wood didn't work a lot for Marvel in the sixties. He was there about a year, during which time he was also producing a fair amount of advertising art and he also drew the first three issues of a Gold Key comic book known variously as Total War or Mars Patrol Total War. For Marvel (by my count), he inked or penciled and inked about ten covers, inked three issues of The Avengers, drew (with some help) seven issues of Daredevil, and he inked one 12-page story for Strange Tales and a few pages in a Captain America story in Tales of Suspense. Then there were those art fixes on Fantastic Four #39 which, Wood told me, he did in about an hour in the Marvel offices.

If he'd stuck around longer, he probably would have inked more covers and more stories and some of the stories might have been penciled by Jack.  Wood told me Stan also wanted him to do some issues of X-Men over Kirby layouts but I suspect that plan went away, along with Stan's thought of having Wood as the artist of the new Sub-Mariner strip in Tales to Astonish, with the decision to up Daredevil and X-Men from bi-monthly to monthly.  That was, of course, just prior to Wood's decision to get out of Marvel and never work, at least directly, for Stan Lee ever again.

But while Wood was there, Stan was happy with the inkers he had on the books Jack was drawing and he put Wood where he felt he needed him at that moment.  Being the editor of a line of comics like that involves moving around a lot of chess pieces and you need to consider all of them with every move.  If Stan had said, as some have wished he had, "I'll have Wood ink Kirby on Fantastic Four," then he'd have had to find someone else to ink The Avengers.  He may have thought that book needed Wood's touch more than any of the Kirby books.  Or Jack's books may have been so far ahead of schedule, as he sometimes was, that Stan wasn't assigning anyone to ink them at the moments when Wood might have had time.

Not long after, Marvel raised its rates for inking.  That made it possible to engage Joe Sinnott to ink F.F., but in the years before that raise, they had a fair amount of trouble finding inkers. A lot of assignments were made based not on "Who'd be the best choice?" but rather "Who's available at the moment?"

As I understand it, Stan would have been much happier to have Wood pencil (only) for Marvel.  Stan tended to judge artists by how well they functioned as plotters or co-plotters.  Could they come up with story ideas?  Could they take one of his sparse story ideas, go home, figure out all the details of the story and bring back twenty fully-penciled pages that he could easily dialogue?  Some guys who could draw pretty-enough pictures couldn't do that.

Obviously, the two artists who were the best at it — who could figure out the whole story and all its twists and turns largely on their own — were Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko. Artists like Don Heck and Dick Ayers could do it decently if/when Stan (or someone) gave them more story input. But it didn't work so well with artists like Bob Powell or Carl Burgos…and when Joe Orlando was drawing Daredevil, he'd plot out and draw the story and then Stan would make him redraw a large hunk of every issue — without pay, of course.

It wasn't that Orlando was a bad artist. It was that he didn't plot the way Stan wanted stories plotted. It only took Joe three issues of Daredevil to decide to take a hike. Another person wrote me to ask why, of all the books Marvel was then putting out, Stan assigned Wally Wood to Daredevil. It was not a profound editorial casting decision. Wood walked in just after Orlando walked out and Daredevil needed an artist. Frankly, I think Wood could have drawn any comic in the place…

…and briefly, Stan thought he'd found another guy with the story sense of Kirby and Ditko.

You asked, "Would Wally have been okay just inking others as needed?" Probably not exclusively. Comic book artists all have different ways of working and sometimes, they have different attitudes about penciling, inking or doing both.

Chic Stone wanted to do full art. For a while though, he let Stan turn him into an inker because that's what the company needed just then. Stone agreed because he didn't have any offers to do full art just then, plus he found it educational to ink Kirby. He told me Stan kept promising him the chance to pencil and after repeated nagging, Stan finally gave him a Human Torch story to pencil. Stone got a few pages into it and then Stan stopped him — the pages were never used — and tried to put him back to inking. I'll bet you the problem wasn't with the way Stone drew but what he drew in each panel…the plotting, not the artwork.  That was when Stone went elsewhere.

John Romita, when he came over, wanted to only ink for a while…and then Stan pressed him into drawing Daredevil when Wood quit and a tryout of Dick Ayers didn't work out. There are other guys who at times wanted to pencil and at times wanted to ink, and at times wanted to do some of each or full art on some feature.  They couldn't always get what they wanted.

Ditko liked to pencil and ink, especially on strips he considered "his" like Spider-Man and Dr. Strange.  He was pressured into doing pencils only for a while on The Hulk — a character he did not consider "his" — but he resisted Stan's requests to let others ink Spider-Man or Dr. Strange so he'd have time to pencil more for Marvel. (George Roussos inked a few Dr. Strange stories and did some uncredited inking on others when Ditko had some health problems.)

What I got from Wood is that once he became the official artist on Daredevil and did some redesigning of the feature, he wanted to pencil and ink that comic on a regular basis. When he realized how much he was expected to contribute to the stories as artist, he began pressing to also write the comic…and Stan did let him write one issue, then declared it a failure which was not to be repeated. That was when Wood decided to leave, which roughly coincided with when he got the offer to do T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents. He told me he did not decide to leave Marvel because of that offer. He decided to leave, then got the offer.

So when he was working for Marvel then, Daredevil was his regular assignment and then he did inking when he had time. He did not want to only ink and he didn't want to only pencil and he didn't want to commit to penciling another regular comic because that would have meant learning who its characters were and its past storylines and doing more of what he considered unpaid and uncredited writing.

And he certainly didn't want to commit to more regular assignments which might have forced him to turn down some of the more lucrative advertising jobs he was offered…and he still had some projects of his own he wanted to pursue. The quantity of work he could do for Stan varied depending on other assignments and who he had available to assist him at any given moment. So he was more comfy just committing to Daredevil and then taking on inking work on a "when I have time for it" basis.

Sorry for the long reply but I hope you found it of interest and I hope that somewhere in there, I answered your question.

I always liked Victor Borge. I saw him perform live three times and every show was exactly the same but I didn't care. It was a good show, well worth multiple viewings.

Here he is on The Ed Sullivan Show for February 14, 1965. It may explain a few of his jokes if I tell you that Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey were sworn into office less than a month before this telecast. Not long before this, Johnson came under a fair amount of criticism for the way he was treating his dogs. On a press tour, he was photographed picking them up by their ears.

The incident was soon forgotten as President Johnson gave people quite a number of other reasons to not like him.

Borge was Danish and at various times, he was referred to as The Clown Prince of Denmark, The Great Dane and The Unmelancholy Dane. He had a fine career as a musician but he began playing less and less, talking more and more, and proving to be a very funny man. I don't know if on this appearance on Ed's show, he ever got around to playing the entire song he promised. Often, he did not…

Electricity in my neighborhood went out at 3:03 in the afternoon and came back on at 3:06 — just long enough for all my clocks to need resetting. Then it went out again at 3:46 and stayed out until 8:08. I am showing great optimism to begin typing this but not enough to start going around, resetting clocks.

During this second outage, there was still a good amount of sunlight out but there were still two separate automotive collisions outside my house, one of which went like this: I heard the thump of metal followed by a barrage of shouted language that would have offended Larry Flynt. Then came police sirens and a fire engine and paramedics, though from my window, I didn't see anyone look seriously injured.

I wish people would learn to drive slower and more cautiously when the traffic lights are out. And why don't those things all have backup batteries that are constantly recharged by solar panels?

During the 4+ hours, I read stuff on my iPad and listened to the latest episode of Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast, which has as its guest, the oft-mentioned-on-this-blog Frank Ferrante. It's a very good conversation and I'll try to embed a link to it below this paragraph. If it doesn't work, there are a half-dozen other places on the Internet where you can hear it like here and here and here.

Yesterday here, I told the story of going to see the Broadway show 42nd Street in New York in 1983 with my friends Len Wein and Marv Wolfman. I said we saw it at the Winter Garden Theatre and this morning, I awoke to an e-mail from Joe Miller telling me that by '83, the show had moved from the Winter Garden (where The Music Man is currently ensconced) to the Majestic Theater (where The Phantom of the Opera has been playing since the Crimean War and where it's expected to remain until you, I and any children or grandchildren you may have are dead and buried.)

Joe is right and I have corrected the post accordingly.

Meanwhile, Marv Wolfman wrote to tell me he recalled a slightly different scenario…and having nothing better to do with no power here, I called him and we discussed it and decided it really doesn't matter. So we agreed to disagree and if you care in the slightest, you're free to believe him or to believe me, except that you should believe me because I'm right.

And now it's 8:40 and the power's still on so I think it's safe to go start resetting clocks.

I refuse to post another thing on this blog until electricity is restored in my area.

Back here, I expressed my amazement that the Senate had passed a bill — unanimously! — to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. That's the current U.S. Senate which you wouldn't think could reach total agreement on a bill that said there should be chocolate chips in chocolate chip cookies. Well, we all should have suspected that unanimous vote was an aberration.

My pal Bob Elisberg, who blogs here, calls my attention to an article in the Washington Post by Dana Milbank. It seems the unanimous vote was kind of an accident…a mistake made by 100 Senators who didn't know what the heck they were voting for. Kinda scary that that can happen.

---

Then the other day here, I posted a link to the "Lullaby of Broadway" number from 42nd Street as performed in a London production. Bob suggests that I also offer you the number as performed by the original cast at the 1981 Tony Awards ceremony. The original cast included Jerry Orbach as Julian Marsh.

This was the first Broadway show I ever saw on or around Broadway. The year was 1983 and I was back in New York for meetings with the DC Comics folks (for whom I was writing/editing Blackhawk), ABC's Saturday morning department (for whom I was writing ABC Weekend Specials) and NBC's daytime department (for whom I was developing a gothic-flavored soap opera).

One evening, my pals Marv Wolfman and Len Wein and I went down to Times Square to the TKTS booth and picked out a show to see, bought half-price tickets, then went to dinner at a Beefsteak Charlie's — a now-extinct chain that then was about as ubiquitous in New York as Duane Reade drug stores, hot dog vendors or Naked Cowboys are today. Then we went to the Winter Garden Majestic Theatre and there we saw 42nd Street. It was everything you'd expect in a show of that sort.

The next night, some other friends of mine and I went to dinner at the Russian Tea Room, followed by the musical Nine at the 46th Street Theater, which is now the Richard Rodgers. It was snowing lightly when we went in see the show and when we came out, we found ourselves in the 13th largest snowstorm on record in the city — no cars on the streets, no trains running, howling winds blowing around the snow and the people…and we were a full mile from the Sherry-Netherland Hotel where we were staying.

I enjoyed the night before a whole lot more. Here's that number from the Tony Awards…