Stephen Sondheim appeared on Stephen Colbert's show on September 16, 2021 for what turned out to be one of Sondheim's last public appearances. After he died, Colbert reran the interview. This version is about two minutes longer than when the conversation was first broadcast…

Which brings us to Part Four of this multi-part article about the day Batman changed forever, that day being (for me) Thursday, March 26, 1964. If you need to catch up, read Part One, then go read Part Two and Part Three. Preferably in that order.

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In the early sixties, DC Comics employed a squadron of editors, each of whom edited a batch of comics for the company. With occasional exceptions, each did his books with a small group of freelancers who didn't freelance much for other DC editors. For example, most of the comics edited by Julius Schwartz were written by Gardner Fox or John Broome. Joe Kubert and Russ Heath drew mostly for Robert Kanigher. As a reader then, it sometimes felt to me like DC was an aggregate of seven different companies. The books of each editor had a distinctive look and feel…and you could tell that the various editors there did not read each other's comics very often, if ever.

My favorites were probably the books edited by Schwartz. Just before the big change in Batman, he was editing the following comics for DC: The Atom (bi-monthly), Flash (8 issues a year), Green Lantern (8 a year), Justice League of America (8 a year), Mystery in Space (8 a year), Strange Adventures (monthly) and he'd just dropped The Brave and the Bold and added a new Hawkman comic (a bi-monthly) to his list.

That worked out to 56 issues per year — a little more than a book per week. Down the hall in Mort Weisinger's office from which the Superman books emanated, they put out the exact same number. Another longtime editor there, Jack Schiff, was in charge of Batman (8 a year), Blackhawk (monthly), Detective Comics (monthly) and World's Finest Comics (8 a year) for a total of 40 issues per year. A slightly easier workload. The other editors there were Murray Boltinoff, George Kashdan, Robert Kanigher and Lawrence Nadle.

The higher-ups at DC — Publisher Jack Liebowitz and Editorial Director Irwin Donenfeld — were aware they needed someone besides Jack Schiff to be in charge of the Batman books and Julie Schwartz, who was editing the most successful non-Superman super-hero comics for the company, seemed to be the guy. But they were also looking at Marvel's rising sales and some of their other titles' declining numbers and this seemed like a good time to swap a number of editors around.

At first, Julie balked at taking over Batman, partly over the added workload and partly because he was afraid his standing within the firm would suffer if he failed to reverse the downward trend of the Bat-Books. They solved the first qualm he had by taking away from him — quite against his wishes — Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures. These, they reassigned to Schiff…so Schwartz lost one monthly and one eight-per-year to Schiff and in exchange, he got one monthly and one eight-per-year…from Schiff.

Schiff also lost World's Finest Comics, the book featuring Superman-Batman team-ups. They moved it from the now-former Batman editor to the Superman editor. Weisinger objected to the added work though according to his friend Julie Schwartz, Mort loved the idea of controlling yet another comic with Superman in it.  He was not that happy that Justice League of America — in which the Man of Steel appeared sparingly — was outside his control.

And a few other books moved about. The monthly Blackhawk (also in need of a facelift) went from Schiff to Boltinoff. In exchange, all the "weird" anthology titles about ghosts and monsters were consolidated under Schiff. He got House of Secrets from Boltinoff. He took over House of Mystery and Tales of the Unexpected) from Kashdan. Kashdan also took over Sea Devils from Kanigher, freeing R.K. to launch a new bi-monthly war comic, Captain Storm.

You don't have to follow all that. I couldn't. I just pointed this out as a time of slight panic at DC. That's why they chose that moment to rotate editors on a dozen of their comics. And why there was a lot riding on Julius Schwartz bringing forth a new look for Batman.

It was easy enough to dump a lot of the sillier elements that had been brought to the property. Out went Batwoman, Batgirl, Bat-Hound, Bat-Mite and a lot (but not all) of the Bat-Paraphernalia. Batman and Robin would still ride about in the Batmobile but they ditched the Bat-Copters and a few other means of Bat-Conveyance. Schwartz put his two main writers, Fox and Broome, to work on scripts and there would also be some by Bill Finger, Ed Herron and Robert Kanigher. The stories emphasized the "detective" side of Batman as he battled villains who were colorful but not interplanetary.

But then came the hard part: The artwork. To be continued further.

Click here to jump to PART FIVE

The website Deadline says that rumors of the reopening of the Cinerama Dome are unfounded. Oh, well. To quote Dorothy Provine's character in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: "It was a nice dream. It lasted almost five minutes."

Here's the third part of this essay. If you haven't read Part One yet, then you probably haven't read Part Two yet. Might be a good idea before you proceed…

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In the early sixties, sales on Batman and Detective Comics (which of course featured Batman) were falling. Some histories say both titles were on the verge of cancellation but the folks I talked to about this — folks who worked for DC back then — said it hadn't quite reached that stage yet…but why wait until it did? DC's other super-hero comics, some of them rather new, were in ascendance. Why were the Caped Crusader's numbers heading in the wrong direction?

As I mentioned in the last part, I think the stories had gotten very silly and lost the essence of the character. And I think the artwork was too cartoony by the standards of the day. Changing the stories was just a matter of deciding to change the stories; to not have Batman and Robin flying off to other planets or battling monsters. Changing the artwork was a little more of a problem. Bob Kane still had that contract that called for the bulk of the Batman art to be at least penciled by his "studio."

The folks at DC thought the "studio" was Bob Kane plus a team of assistants. In truth, the "studio" was a man named Sheldon Moldoff who worked for DC, mainly as an inker, when he wasn't ghosting for Kane. In fact, Moldoff had been drawing for DC Comics before there was a DC Comics. He worked for all the companies — two or three, depending on how you count — that merged to form the famous company. He had a page in Action Comics #1. He drew the first covers featuring the Golden-Age Flash and Green Lantern.

"Shelly," as he sometimes signed the work of his that he signed at all, worked briefly with Bob Kane in the earliest months of Batman, then left to pursue his own career. In 1953, he became Kane's primary ghost artist…a position that was a mixed blessing. The money was okay but just barely…and of course, there was no credit. There was also the matter of dealing with Kane, who could be very difficult. Decades later, Shelly would be sitting on panels at comic book conventions, moderated by me and others, with Jerry Robinson, Lew Schwartz, Jim Mooney, Dick Sprang and others who drew stories bearing Kane's signature…and they'd be talking about what a cheap pain-in-the-butt Bob Kane could be.

Then again, the position kept Moldoff fully employed during some rough years when even some of the best artists in comics couldn't get enough work and had to scramble to earn wages in other fields. So it was not without its advantages. He also worked on some of Kane's non-Batman, non-DC ventures, like a cartoon show Kane was involved with, Courageous Cat and Minute Mouse.

One artist ghosting for another was not uncommon nor was it automatically assumed the ghost was being wronged. Quite a few of the top newspaper strips were not the work of the guy who got the credit. For over twenty years, not one bit of the popular Mutt & Jeff strip was written or drawn by Bud Fisher, the guy who'd created it, the guy whose name was on it. He'd turned the job over to a cartoonist named Al Smith. Ham Fisher (no relation) only wrote or drew the strip that he allegedly wrote and drew, Joe Palooka, when one ghost quit and it took him a while to find another.

And Shelly did do work as himself, mainly inking for DC. Sometimes, they had him ink "Bob Kane" pencils that he'd drawn…which raised the interesting question, "Didn't the DC editors know?" Moldoff said they didn't…or if they did, they didn't say anything. I asked others who were around then and got answers ranging from "Everyone knew" to "No one had any idea."

The answer I got that seemed the most convincing to me came from DC editor George Kashdan. He said, "No one thought Kane did it all or even most of it. But Kane had this contract and it was easier to just do 'Don't ask, don't tell.' As long as the pages came in on time, which they almost always did, no one cared. I guess we figured Shelly was doing some of it and weren't shocked to hear he was doing all of it." (It has been my observation that a number of editors working in comics over the years had much less ability to recognize the styles of artists they hired than did some of us readers.)

It became an issue in 1963 when DC started talking about changing the look and feel of their Batman comics. How do you change the art when there's a contract that says you can't change the artist? We'll discuss what they did in the next chapter.

Click here to jump to PART FOUR

I will be quite pleased if this turns out to be true and if someone there is savvy enough to schedule It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World there soon after it reopens…

Hollywood's Cinerama Dome Plans to Reopen in 2022

Hollywood's historic Cinerama Dome theater has plans to reopen in 2022, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

On Dec. 16, a public notice of an application to sell alcoholic beverages was posted outside the theater, with the business name listed as Cinerama. Studio distribution sources confirmed the theater, built in 1963 by the Decurion Corporation, is preparing to resume showings, after having been dark since March of 2020.

Read the whole article here. Thanks to all the folks who sent me this in the last hour.

Stephen Sondheim appeared twice as a guest on The Colbert Report and I find those chats fascinating.  I actually found all the interviews Mr. Colbert did on that show fascinating because they were done with almost no prep or pre-interviews, and Colbert not only had to improvise his end of the conversation, he had to do so in character. A lot of folks who are considered expert at improvisational comedy marveled at his ability to do this.

He would tell the guest before the show something like, "I'm playing an idiot.  Don't be afraid to push back and treat me like one." This worked surprisingly well when he had on a guest with many areas of disagreement…and it was probably even harder for him to play that moron when the guest was someone he clearly admired, such as Sondheim.

Sondheim's first time on the show was 12/14/10 to plug the book Finishing the Hat and you can view that interview here.  Notice how much these guys liked each other and how Sondheim really seems to be enjoying himself.

He came back on 11/30/11 to promote the follow-up book and again, you can see how well these two men got along…

I am still limiting, and will continue to limit, the amount of this blog focusing on political matters, especially those pertaining to a certain persistent presence with the initials, "Donald Trump."  But I thought this was worth a link: Conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg explaining why he got the hell outta Fox News.  Brief summary: Too many people there were lying and a lot of them even knew they were lying.

The late George Carl — never to be confused with the late George Carlin — was one of my favorite performers. So was Mr. Carlin for that matter and I saw both of them perform glorious, not-to-be-forgotten sets in Las Vegas.

I was there with my buddy Len Wein — this was quite some time ago — and I insisted we go see the show at the Stardust, a revue that featured topless showgirls…and George Carl. I tried to explain why but it was hard to explain George Carl. I asked Len to trust me and I said something like, "Even if you hate the guy, there will still be topless showgirls." He agreed and so we sat there howling at Mr. Carl until Len managed to gasp, "I get it." He was even a bit disappointed when Carl left the stage and the topless showgirls came back on.

Here's George Carl on The Ed Sullivan Show for December 26, 1965. Sorry — no topless showgirls this time…

This is Part Two of a multi-part article about how Batman changed forever, at least for me, on Thursday, March 26, 1964.  If you haven't read Part One, go read Part One first.

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As we all know, Bob Kane created Batman and drew every Batman story through the mid-sixties and no, I didn't even believe that when I was twelve. I had never heard of Bill Finger, the friend of Bob Kane's who wrote most of the early stories, particularly those that added new villains and other key elements of the Batman mythology.

I hadn't heard the names of any of the artists who really drew Batman then but I had a clue. I knew those stories weren't all by Bob Kane because there were different art styles. I thought, "He must have helpers" and I wondered which art style was really Bob Kane. It turned out none of them really were.

There was one style that looked an awful lot like the style of the guy who drew some of the Superman-Batman stories in World's Finest Comics but they weren't signed…by Bob Kane or anyone. If that was Bob Kane, the man who signed every Batman story, why wasn't he signing his Superman-Batman stories? And the same art style could be seen in the Supergirl stories in the back of Action Comics. If Bob Kane didn't have time to draw all the Batman stories, why would he anonymously be drawing Supergirl stories?  Eventually, the artist began signing those Supergirl stories and I found out his name was Jim Mooney.

Here is how it worked. In the beginning, Bob's "studio" produced the art for Batman stories. Bob did a little of it, especially on the syndicated Batman newspaper strip. But he had a lot of assistants, all of whom drew better than he did, and he increasingly lost interest in sitting at the drawing board day and night, especially when someone else could be paid to do that.

He worked up a deal with DC Comics whereby "he" would supply a certain amount of Batman art per month. He would be paid so well for these pages that he could hire someone else to do all or most of the artwork on them and then he could live quite well off the rest of that compensation. DC didn't care. Much of what they published wasn't actually drawn by the guy they hired to draw it. Joe Shuster had an awful lot of help on Superman.

If DC wanted more Batman pages than the deal with Kane called for, DC was free to hire artists on their own — anyone as long as the art was signed "Bob Kane."  The list of those artists included one of my favorites, Dick Sprang, along with Curt Swan, Winslow Mortimer, Jim Mooney and inker Charles Paris.  The main guy who worked directly for Kane cranking out pages was Sheldon Moldoff but there was a period there when Lew Schwartz did the unsigned honors.  Another of my favorites, Jerry Robinson, worked for Kane for a while and then for DC as did George Roussos.

By the early sixties, most of the Batman stories were penciled by Sheldon Moldoff for Kane with occasional jobs by Mooney or Sprang. Sprang retired in 1963. Charles Paris or Sheldon Moldoff did the inking. The art by then was not wonderful but I think the main problem was the scripts, which had gotten very silly. A lot of them involved Batman not fighting crime in Gotham City (i.e., the original premise of the feature) but battling space aliens, occasionally on other planets. There were two reasons for this…

One was that Batman had been hanging around a lot with Superman. As originally conceived in the forties, World's Finest Comics was a thick comic book that had room for a long story of Superman and a long story of Batman — DC's two big guns — and room for various back-up features. But as comics (and everything else) became more expensive to produce, comic books got smaller. In 1954 when they contracted from 64 to 32 pages, someone decided that rather than toss out more of the back-up features in World's Finest, they'd feature Superman and Batman together in one story instead of two separate ones.

When you appear with Superman, you're already fraternizing with someone from another planet. And when he's all-powerful and can fly and pick up Buicks, the stories have to be about some villain Superman can't defeat in three panels…or a crisis of interplanetary awesomeness. That means cosmic-scale menaces and lots of monsters and space aliens. So Batman was now in that world and a few years later, he wasn't just palling about with Superman…there was also the whole bloomin' Justice League of America.

So he was now a guy who fought mortal criminals in Gotham City and interacted with unworldly beings, be they friend or foe.

The other reason: The best-selling comics DC published were those that featured Superman and his featured players. The editor of those books, Mort Weisinger, liked to spend much time in editorial meetings boasting about his sales and suggesting he knew better than ever how to sell comics. And maybe he did just then with regard to the Man of Steel. But increasingly, Batman editor Jack Schiff felt pressure to make his comics more like Weisinger, even to the extent of emulating plot ideas and cover scenes.

The more sales on Batman and Detective Comics went down, the more they tried to do more of what was selling for Superman and the less Batman was Batman and…oh, it was not a good time for the Caped Crusader. Sales were falling and something had to be done. It was and in the next part, we'll discuss what was. I found it on a newsstand on 3/26/64.

Click here to jump to PART THREE

Imelda Staunton performs "Losing My Mind" in a 2017 production of Follies by the National Theater…

The electricity in my neighborhood just came back on after being out all morning so the second chapter of my Batman article will be a little tardy getting up here.

Several folks e-mailed to tell me, in case I didn't know, that a liquor store in New York sold only liquor and nothing else. One person informed me they didn't even sell tobacco products. I guess I knew that. I was just surprised back in 1970 that the head of DC Comics, after telling us they were dealing with all sorts of distribution problems didn't know that a substantial portion of their product being sold in California was sold in places called liquor stores.

Every few days, we learn more and more about what happened in our nation's capitol on January 6 and the evidence points in only one direction. William Saletan reviews the latest pieces fitting into the puzzle.

I'm remembering Thursday, March 26, 1964. Join me there for a moment and for the other chapters of this story. We'll be jumping from time period to time period a la Peabody and Sherman but we'll keep coming back to that day.

I'm 12 years and 26 days old and a ritual of my life is finding a comic book rack every Tuesday and Thursdays because that's when the new comics are put on sale in most cities and certainly in mine. There are no comic book shops. You find a comic book rack in a drugstore or a market or a newsstand…and in my native Los Angeles, you find them a lot in liquor stores.

Quick flash forward to 1970. The first time I visited the DC offices in New York, I met dozens of people who'd created the comic books I'd read most of my life. One of many was Carmine Infantino, who at that point I believe had the title of Editorial Director of the line. A year or three later, he was promoted to Publisher and a year or two after that, he was severed from the company as totally and coldly as the way he himself had sometimes discharged longtime employees.

I'm there with my then-partner Steve Sherman and Mr. Infantino starts asking us about comic book distribution in Los Angeles. He asks us where we buy our comics. We tell him we each go to a different liquor store. He is stunned. In New York, a liquor store is a place that sells liquor, tobacco products and very little else. Why would kids go into a liquor store?

We explain that in Los Angeles, liquor stores are mostly like mini-markets also carrying groceries, notions and magazines — including comic books. He says, "That's a convenience shop." We tell him, "In L.A., they're called liquor stores." News to him. He makes some notes.

Back to 3/26/64. That day, I go to Pico Drug, a great establishment in West Los Angeles and the source of much of my comic book collection. There, I find all the new comics and I begin plucking the issues I will purchase off the glorious rack there. At some point, I find the new issue of Detective Comics, a book I have collected for several years. I have purchased every issue new off the racks since I began collecting super-hero-type comics and I have found 50-100 back issues at second-hand bookstores. So I know the comic well…

…but suddenly, unexpectedly, it has changed. It was the first time I ever saw a comic book change like that.

We'll be discussing that change in Part Two of this, tomorrow. Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Blog.

Click here to jump to PART TWO

Hey, you know who that is? The guy, not the cat. That's Sid Krofft, the master puppeteer and showman…and my occasional employer over the last half-century. I worked for Sid and Marty a lot and whatever it was, it was fascinating. And fun. And there were many other perks, including the people I met and hearing about the people they'd met. Some folks think I know everyone who's ever been in show business. It is to laugh. Compared to Sid, I'm a friendless hermit.

He is much loved throughout show business and lately, he's had a lot of famous celebrities on the podcast he does live every Sunday afternoon at 3 PM on Instagram. Apparently though, everyone famous is busy for the holidays because his guest this coming Sunday the nineteenth will be me. I'll post more details before then if you want to tune in…which you should do every Sunday, even when I'm not his guest.