Hey, can anyone who uses an iPhone suggest a good Blackjack app for mine? I want one that's free with no ads or "in-app purchases" or which I can try out and then, if I like it, pay a few bucks for it and never get ads or offers of "in-app purchases." I've tried a few and I keep finding myself in commercial breaks for some variation of Tetris they want me to buy.

This may or may not be the last one of these before the election.  I'm not thinking that much about it and I have the feeling that with so much early voting and so much we've heard about the match-up, the winner has already been decided.  We just don't know who it is yet…a condition which may persist for quite some time.  I mean, we know Donald Trump will insist it was rigged unless he wins near-unanimously.  We know there will be anomalies and some voting sites or counting rooms about which accusations will be made.  Someone will swear they saw a voting machine change their vote to the candidate they didn't intend to vote for.  I'm just plain tired of it all.

One thing I'm really tired of is supposed news stories that come out of nowhere.  No one witnessed them.  No one has any evidence of them. No one stands behind their accuracy.  But someone may taken them as true and someone has to debunk them.  Politifact is now debunking a story that's making the rounds that Beyoncé was paid $10 million smackers to endorse Kamala Harris.

There's no source…no explanation for how anyone could find this out…and it doesn't make a lot of sense. First of all, I'm not sure you could get Beyoncé to do anything for a measly $10 million. She makes that much humming in the shower. Secondly, how would anyone find out about such a transaction?

Speaking of showers, it's like Trump's story about Arnold Palmer. Where the hell did that come from? I don't think golfers even shower together but if they did, does one of them run out and tell…oh, never mind. It's amazing how people give any credibility to a story that has no source and no logical source…and obvious reasons for someone to just make it up outta nowhere. And I'm not the only one who feels that way. Just last week, Abraham Lincoln told me he was fed up to the top of his stovepipe hat…

I link here to a lot of videos about Saturday Night Live and also about The Muppets.  Here's a twenty-minute documentary on how The Muppets were a part of the early days of SNL.  It was not a happy marriage of talents…

Jeff Bezos has written this editorial-type statement defending the Washington Post's decision — which is to say, his decision (ultimately) — to not endorse in this presidential election. This is in response to many subscriptions being canceled since this was announced. He doesn't say how many it is but N.P.R. says it's over 200,000, which is a pretty substantial number. He also does not talk about how many members of his staff have resigned in protest.

He does say "I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy." He's right they should have made it earlier. He should have made it before (reportedly) the editorial staff had decided the paper should endorse Kamala Harris.

I was (past-tense) a Washington Post digital subscriber — for $120 a year. Interestingly, when I clicked on the link to cancel my sub the other day, I instantly got a message that offered me an almost-immediate $60 rebate on my subscription should I decide to not cancel. I suspect everyone does not see this…only those of us who have some certain number of weeks left on their current subs. In my case, it's a lot. My subscription was on auto-renewal and it renewed on September 26. I declined the offer and am curious as to whether I will soon have discounts waved in front of me to rejoin.

I have access until September 26, 2025 and otherwise, nothing has changed except that now when I go the Washington Post website, I get a message that warns me I need to renew soon or I will lose full access. Yes…in 332 days. I have ample time to decide.

I started going to Las Vegas around 1986, just in time to pay one (1) visit to the Silver Slipper casino on The Strip.  I went in and walked around the place, absorbing the sense of Old Vegas that it had then….a sense that is nowhere to be found in that city now.  I played a little Blackjack and as was my custom then, left when I was ≈$50 ahead.  If you play long enough, you'll eventually lose everything so the trick to winning is to accept a modest win and move on.

The place intrigued me and I figured I'd go back on my next visit to Vegas and explore the Silver Slipper in greater depth…but on my next trip, it was in the process of being demolished. I was momentarily concerned that my big win had put them out of business but I decided that probably wasn't the problem. The land became a parking lot for the Frontier Hotel until the Frontier Hotel was demolished and now both their former sites are empty lots….very, very valuable empty lots. Some super-sized megaresort that costs zillions to build will sprout on that real estate someday.

But the Silver Slipper had an interesting history.  It opened in 1950 and for most of that decade, it offered three things that brought players to its doors.  It had one of the best buffets — great food at a teensy price, available 24/7. It had the rep, true or not, of offering slightly more beatable games than other casinos. And it had the most popular burlesque shows in town, usually headlined by some woman who was famous for disrobing and some comic who'd been a Top Banana back in the days of Minsky's. The comic was often Hank Henry or Tommy "Moe" Raft and they did three or four shows a night including often one at 3 AM.

Vegas doesn't offer shows at that hour anymore but it did then. All the headliners at other hotels — including Frank Sinatra and Johnny Carson when they were in town — were known to flock to that 3 AM show to watch the top comedians of that tradition.

All was well at the Silver Slipper until 1964 when the place was shut down by the Nevada Gaming Control Board for using "flat dice" at its crap tables. "Flat dice" are gimmicked dice and these were not gimmicked to favor the players. It was one of the very rare instances in Vegas history of an established hotel cheating its customers and all the other Vegas casinos demanded it be stopped and prosecuted.

One of the big selling points for wagering your paycheck in Vegas instead of your local bookie or backroom crap game was that in Vegas, the games were allegedly honest. The other hotels wanted to protect that reputation, as undeserved as it may have been at times. Eventually, new management reopened the Slipper but then in 1968, Howard Hughes bought it which was never good for any casino.

Thereafter, the Slipper struggled to stay competitive with the new hotels that were being built that could offer more comps, hire bigger performers for their showrooms, offer plusher rooms and just seem more modern. In 1977, the big sign at the Silver Slipper that said "BURLESQUE" changed to "BOYLESQUE" and the performers were thereafter female impersonators headlined by a guy who did Joan Rivers. Reportedly, this was good for business but still, the Hughes company sold it in '87 to the folks who turned it into a parking lot and that was the end of the Silver Slipper.

But getting back to those burlesque shows: I have a fascination with that kind of comedian and a regret that I never got to see any of them work in their natural habitats. I can still see Laurel & Hardy, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers — performers like that — at their peak. But very little film exists of the Hank Henrys or the Moe Rafts and what's around is amateurishly produced and obviously not them at their best. (Keaton, by the way, did a few tours of duty in the burlesque revues at the Silver Slipper. So did Billy Gilbert, as well as Joe DeRita in his pre-Stooge days.)

If I could go back in time with Mr. Peabody in his WABAC machine, I think I'd like to see this show that played the Silver Slipper…

Hank Henry…The Girl in the Champagne Glass…and Bela Lugosi, who was (I assume) their "Dracula in person" on the same stage?  That had to be one hell of a show.  "The Bela Lugosi Revue," as it was called in ads, ran from February 19 until March 27, 1954. Vegas then was a booming town with new homes and hotels being built at a brisk clip. Residential areas were springing up and often, streets were named for whoever was headlining in the town at the moment. There was (and may still be in some cases) a Fred Astaire St., a Peter Lorre St., an Elvis Presley Ct. and, yes, a Bela Lugosi St. That may have been the only honor Mr. Lugosi got out of his time at the Silver Slipper.

It was not a good time for him. He divorced his fourth wife in 1953, married his fifth in 1955 and was in the process of divorcing #5 when he died of a heart attack in 1956. Obviously, he was appearing in a Vegas burlesque show because he wasn't making a living in Hollywood, working only occasionally in movies like Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952) and a couple of Ed Wood masterpieces. His last really good film — and I mean this, it's a great movie — was Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948.

What did the show consist of? I wish I knew…and unless I get a ride in one of them time machines, we may never know. But it's kinda fun to imagine…

From Randall Jessica Rainbow…

As I've mentioned here more times than I've plugged Frank Ferrante, my favorite movie is It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Another film of the sixties that I like a lot is The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, which was written by William Rose. Mr. Rose and his wife Tania wrote It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and there are a few tiny connections. In one film, Jonathan Winters has to ride a shaky girl's bicycle and in the other, Carl Reiner does. Also, Reiner and Winters were in both movies as were a couple of other folks like Paul Ford and Ben Blue, and both movies had wonderful poster art by Jack Davis.

The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming is another movie that can be viewed for free — at least in my country and a few others — on YouTube but it cannot be embedded on this site. So I've set up a link for you. Click on the image below and it will take you there. It's a fun film and it's largely stolen by Alan Arkin who was not too well-known at the time. But he sure was after this…

My longtime pal Paul Harris and I agree on most things but I don't think we do on this issue of newspapers declining to endorse presidential candidates due to their wealthy owners fearing retaliation from Donald Trump. Here's what Paul had to say and he's right that no newspaper endorsement is going to swing undecided voters.

But first of all, it's a bad precedent for newspapers to do anything out of fear of retaliation from the government.

Secondly, undecided voters aren't going to be completely swayed by anything as toothless as a newspaper editorial but some might be moved by the feeling of consensus out there. Hearing that almost all the major newspapers have endorsed Harris might be meaningful to some people. It might be a factor in causing someone to think she can't possibly be as dangerous for America as Trump and his sycophants are screaming.

No, the Washington Post editorial page didn't bring down Richard Nixon. But the editorial page kinda speaks for the management of the newspaper and the unwavering support the newspaper puts behind its reporters has had a lot to do with the effectiveness of their reporting. The regime then of Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham said to Nixon, in effect, "You can't push us around." The current regime is saying, in effect, "Well, you can on some matters."

Barnum was a musical which I never felt got enough attention. It opened on Broadway at the end of April in 1980 and stayed there for 854 performances, which was a pretty good run. I suspect one reason it isn't revived more often is that it requires a leading man who can sing difficult word patter songs, walk a tightrope, do other physical feats and be charming while being conniving. Also, circuses are not in great favor these days.

One person who filled the bill to play the title character was Michael Crawford, who starred in the London production. He worked hard to play the part and if you want to know how hard, watch the video at this link.

The London production was, fortunately for us, captured on video and released in many formats. It's now on YouTube but, alas, I cannot embed it here for technical reasons. Ah, but if you click on the image below, you will be transferred over to YouTube and you can watch it there…

Hello. This is a rerun from July 16, 2015 and insofar as I can tell, nothing in it has changed so no update is required.

I always hear people who've "made it" (in whatever field) tell folks who haven't: "Never give up. If you keep pursuing your dream, eventually you will succeed." This, I do not buy. I mean, it's a lovely thought — like marriages are forever and good always triumphs over evil — but it's just not so. Bet you can name twenty people who will do everything humanly possible to become President of the United States but will never spend one night in the White House.

I explained more about my viewpoint on this back here and in other posts. Right now, I want to tell you a story about someone I knew who never "made it." A few of you reading this will recognize who I'm talking about and if so, please keep it to yourself. I'm posting this to enlighten others, not to humiliate him…and I'm going to call him Harlow.

Harlow wanted very badly to be a famous cartoonist but I don't think his dream really included the part where you sit at a drawing table for twelve hours a day and draw, draw, draw. Whenever we talked about his goals, he seemed to only be interested in the part where he makes a lot of money and people say, "Hey, there goes a famous cartoonist." He idolized people like Jack Kirby and Milton Caniff but never grasped a key element of their success. Those two men worked their butts off for their entire lives.

So right there, I thought he had a basic misunderstanding of the career he sought. That alone can be fatal to most goals in life.

He didn't give up but he also didn't try very hard to improve his work. He half-heartedly signed up for a few classes and missed half of them. He didn't spend hundreds and hundreds of hours sketching like most artists need to do to get good. He'd just sit down, dash off a drawing every so often…then he'd wait for someone to throw money at him for it. This never happened.

I also thought there was another obstacle to him achieving his career objective: He was a terrible artist.

If he had tried harder, he would have been better but how much better, we'll never know for sure. My hunch is that he'd never have been great and might not even have ever gotten good enough to have a real career in the field. I further suspect that deep down, he may have known that and not seen the point of working harder at it.

His hope was that somehow — he had no likely idea how — he'd land a high-paying cartooning job and then he could hire talented assistants to do all the work. This was not entirely without precedent and here's one example of many: After Bud Fisher launched his newspaper strip, Mutt & Jeff, he hired ghosts to put in all those hours at the board. One of them — Al Smith — wrote and drew it for 48 years. As long as Fisher was alive, Smith did it all including the part where he signed "Bud Fisher" on every strip.

Harlow more or less hoped to emulate Fisher but there was a fundamental flaw in that plan: Bud Fisher did have the talent to draw the strip. He wrote and drew it for several years before handing it off to assistants. He made it successful enough that he could afford assistants. Harlow couldn't have done the first part which meant he never could have gotten to the second part.

Still, he tried and tried to break into cartooning work. He had a portfolio of samples which he forced upon anyone he thought might be able to hire him or recommend him to someone for work. When he thrust it before my eyes, I tried — honest, I tried — to think of somewhere in the cartooning world where there might be a place for him. I could not come up with one. This, alas, did not stop Harlow from trying to get work on a recommendation from me.

One day, he went to the Los Angeles offices of Western Publishing Company, which were then located on Hollywood Boulevard, directly across the street from the famed Chinese Theater. Western published many kinds of publications but he was mainly interested in the Gold Key Comics line, half of which was edited out of that office. The other half were edited in the firm's New York office. L.A. did comics like Tarzan, Woody Woodpecker, Scooby Doo, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Woodsy Owl, Pink Panther and all the Disney titles as well as many, many more. I was writing many of them at the time.

There would later be some disagreement as to how he represented himself there that day. Del Connell, an editor for Western who agreed to see him, said that he announced he was a friend of Mark Evanier and that I had sent him with my highest recommendation. Harlow later swore to me that he had merely mentioned he was a friend of Mark Evanier…which I guess was true. Del — a trusting soul — did not call me to check and see if what he heard Harlow say I'd said was what I'd said. I had not said that.

Del looked at his samples and decided Harlow was nowhere near qualified to draw or ink or even letter for their comics. This was true. Still, the guy seemed so eager…or maybe so needy. And there was one job Del had open at that moment…

Western was then publishing a few comics in digest format. Most of what was in them was reprints of material done for conventional-sized comics and that presented a problem. You couldn't just shrink an entire page drawn for a regular-size comic book down to the size of a digest comic page. They tried that for a time and realized the images were too small and the lettering was way too small. Also, the proportions of the pages did not match up.

So what they began doing was to have two sets of stats made of each of the old stories they wanted to reprint in digest format. They were reduced to two different sizes. Someone would then take these stats and repaste the panels in a new layout. They would take the artwork and rearrange it to fit the digest format, putting fewer panels on each page. A story that was 12 pages in the original format might be 16 or 18 pages in digest format.

They might take the images (as opposed to the lettering) in a given panel from either of the two sets of stats but they would take the word balloons wholly off one set so the lettering would be of a consistent size throughout. They'd rearrange that which needed rearrangement and paste all this up and it would then be necessary to do some minor art here and there, extending the background of a drawing or finishing a figure. Also, the rearranger would have to draw new panel borders around each panel.

If my explanation confuses you — and it would sure confuse me — take a look at the image below. It may explain things far better than I can here. On the left is a page as it ran in a comic book with the conventional page dimensions. At right is a portion of the material on that page reconfigured for a digest page. Note how someone drew in a few little things that weren't there before…

Okay, so it was mostly a cut-and-paste job but it did require some minor artistic skill to reposition images and to fill in a bit of minor drawing here and there and to rule new panel borders. Del decided to give Harlow a shot at this. They were at that moment preparing an issue of Walt Disney Comics Digest that would be all Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge stories by the great man himself, Carl Barks. Del explained to Harlow in great detail what had to be done. Then he gave him the stats to one Donald Duck story and sent him on his way with a one-week deadline.

Harlow was in heaven. He was a professional artist working in comic books…and on a Carl Barks story, no less.

Others who had done such work for Western could have done the job in a few days. Harlow took three weeks, most of which was spent coming up with other things he had to do before he could tackle the assignment…like, say, go to the movies. Finally though, he turned in the finished job. Del pronounced it utterly unusable.

The paste-ups were sloppy. The panel borders were shaky and blotchy. The places where he had to extend Barks' artwork were obvious because Harlow's linework didn't come close to matching what Barks had done. Del only had to look at the first page to realize that the whole job had to be redone by someone else.

As he paged through the rest of it, he got angry. He had explicitly told Harlow to extend Barks' drawings as necessary but not to change them in any other way. Harlow had done little additions and changes to the figures themselves, adding a new pattern on someone's shirt or adding gratuitous hair to some character's head. In one spot, he had added eyelids on Donald Duck, changing the facial expression Barks had drawn.

This was Carl Barks, widely hailed as the best artist who ever drew these characters…the creator of some of them. Harlow, an absolute beginner, had decided to "improve" Barks.

Harlow had also hidden his name on almost every page, writing it in on signs in the background or as graffiti on walls. Carl's name appeared nowhere on the story but Harlow's appeared in about fourteen places.

Del told Harlow that the job was unacceptable. They would not use it. He would not pay for it.

Harlow responded by screaming and crying.

Here, roughly, is how Del described it to me on the phone two minutes after he got Harlow out of his office: "I told him I wouldn't pay him for it and he began yelling and having some sort of breakdown. Everyone else in the office rushed in to see what was wrong. He started crying about how he wanted to be a cartoonist all his life and everybody was conspiring to deny it to him and how I was the latest one and he was not going to put up with us doing it to him any longer!

"I finally agreed to pay him half as a kill fee just to be rid of him. Zetta filled out the forms to pay him and then he left." Zetta DeVoe was the Associate Editor and Office Manager. She later confirmed Del's account to me as did others who worked there.

That phone conversation from Del to me had started with him saying, "Mark, that guy you sent me really screwed up the job I gave him." To which I replied, "What guy I sent you?" That's when Del told me Harlow had said he had my recommendation.

I told Del, "I wish you'd checked with me because I never sent him to you" and Del admitted that, yes, he should have done that. Before the call ended, I told him, "If you need someone to paste up digest pages, I can send you someone I do recommend."

I got off with Del and called a friend of mine named Rick Hoppe. Rick is now a top animator who's worked on Disney films and others but at the time, he was a beginning artist with more talent than most long-time professionals. He ran up to Del's office and picked up the stats to another Barks story that was slated to run in the same digest. He took the job home, repasted everything and I went in with him two days later when he delivered it. Del said what he did was perfect. No changes necessary.

Rick wound up doing that kind of work — and other, more complicated assignments — for Western Publishing until others started offering him far better art jobs. The third or fourth assignment he got from Del was to totally redo the Barks story that Harlow had ruined. Del ordered up two new sets of stats and Rick repasted them using none of what Harlow had done.

Harlow and I discussed the whole incident twice. The first time was the evening after Del called to tell me my "recommendation" had flopped. Harlow swore to me he had not said I'd recommended him. He also insisted he did a perfectly fine, professional job and that Del had said what he'd said in order to try and cheat him out of his fee. He was proud that he stood up to Del and got half of it.

Eight to ten months later, I was at a weekend comic convention that was held in a hotel up in Universal City. Harlow was present and he came up to me and asked if I knew if the issue of Walt Disney Comics Digest with his work in it was out yet. The digests had odd distribution and were very hard to find in some areas. I got my copies in the bundles I picked up at the office.

I told Harlow that the issue in question had gone on sale a few weeks earlier but his repasting job had been redone by someone else. He did not believe me and he went off to find a dealer in the room who had copies. Several did and Harlow bought every copy he could find on the premises.

He told me — like I was stupid enough to fall for that lie about his work being unacceptable — that it was definitely his paste-up. "They took out my name in all the places where I put it but I recognize all my little additions and changes."

The person I'm calling Harlow is no longer with us. To his dying day though, he refused to believe that his work had not been printed. Not only that but on his résumé, he listed it as a credit, phrasing it like he was Carl Barks's collaborator. He did not even indicate that he was referring to, at most, one reprint. If you read what he wrote, you might have thought that all those great Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comic books were drawn in the first place by Carl Barks and Harlow.

That wasn't the only credit on that résumé. Through sheer persistence, he got a few others — some, even real. Sadly — and I really mean that — at no point did he ever get near a living wage in the cartooning profession. There was never a moment when someone pointed his way and said, "Hey, there goes a famous cartoonist," which was the main thing he wanted. I know I felt bad for the guy but I was never sure if it was because he didn't get what he wanted or because he wasted so much of his life trying to attain the unattainable.

I told this story here because at Comic-Con last week, an aspiring writer asked me for some advice and I quoted my oft-offered belief — I'm sure I've said it on this blog and more than once — that to become a writer or actor or almost anything of a "glamorous" nature, one must find the sweet spot between Idealism and Pragmatism and not have an excess of either.

The newbie seeking my counsel instantly understood what I meant by an excess of Pragmatism. You don't get far by limiting yourself to what you absolutely know is possible. He asked me for an example of Too Much Idealism and I started to tell him the Harlow story then said, "Wait. I'll post it on my blog after I get home from the con and sleep for at least three days." Today is Thursday so there you have it.

I really believe in this concept I came up with — at least, I think I came up with it — about the balance of Idealism and Pragmatism. Everyone I've ever known who has failed has had too much of one and not enough of the other. You can't achieve a dream if you don't have one…but you also can't succeed in the real world without having at least one foot in the real world. Harlow had about half his little toe in there, maybe less.

This time around, we have two of my favorite movies. If you've never seen It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World before, I suggest you not watch it here, especially alone, especially on a small screen. Wait until some theater near you is running it on a big screen with a big audience because it really needs both. But if you've already seen it that way and just want to refresh your memory, here it is…

And here are Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon in The Fortune Cookie from 1966. I had this movie up once before and a lot of you wrote to say you enjoyed it…

A little more about that industry-shaking first telecast of what was later called Saturday Night Live. As I've mentioned before here, it's interesting how much Lorne Michaels had to fill that ninety minutes. We tend to think of that program as mainly a sketch show but in addition to comedy sketches, the first episode featured…

• Stand-up comedy. George Carlin hosted and he did three stand-up spots. There was a monologue by Valri Bromfield and Andy Kaufman did his record pantomime to the theme from "Mighty Mouse." (An additional stand-up spot didn't get in. Just before airtime, a kid named Billy Crystal was told he'd have to trim his routine to the bone and at the advice of his managers, he walked.)
• Two musical acts: Janis Ian and Billy Preston performing two numbers apiece.
• "The Land of Gorch" featuring the Muppets.
• A film by Albert Brooks.
• A spot with Paul Simon plugging his appearance the following week.
• Five pre-recorded parody commercials.
• Weekend Update with Chevy Chase.

Not only that but though the sketches were few in number, he had nine performers available to be in them…

The roster of the Not Ready for Prime Time Players changed a bit in the following weeks. George Coe was on the show a couple more times but I think he was only in the opening titles once. Michael O'Donoghue was on and off this list but after the fourth or fifth show, no longer billed, even though he was on the show a number of times. Some people think the show was thrown together at the last minute but let's take a look at the TV Guide listing which had to be submitted around ten days before the show aired…

That's reasonably accurate.  Apart from the misspelling of Dan Aykroyd's name, there is the omission of O'Donoghue, Coe and Chevy Chase from the listing…and Chevy got more camera time on that episode than the others in the N.R.F.P.T. Players.  Knowing how agents will often fight over the order of clients' billing, I'm wondering how the on-screen list was ordered.  The TV Guide listing looks like they just took the first six names from the same list and alphabetized them.

But you can see that the challenge of that first show was not so much of what to do on it but what to throw out.  And it was then being sold as a variety show with music rather than a comedy show with music breaks.  The following week with Paul Simon hosting and musical guests Randy Newman, Phoebe snow, Art Garfunkel and the Jesse Dixon Singers, it was a music show with sparse comedy spots. It took a few week to figure out what the show was.

The current SNL always feels too overbooked to me. This season, the "repertory company" (no longer the Not Ready for Prime Time Players) usually has twelve names plus there are five or six "featured players" and a couple of writers who always seem to sneak in. Even with that, the most visible, notable sketches often cast most of those 17 or 18 performers aside in favor of an Alec Baldwin, a Steve Martin or anybody else with the mantle of Movie Star. In what were for me the show's best years, the stars each week were one guest host plus eight rep company folks and three or four featured players.

I tend to not watch it as a program anymore. I watch excerpts on YouTube. A friend of mine who watches every episode thinks it's still a pretty good show but "there's rarely anything entertaining after Weekend Update and if the cold opening is bad, most of what follows will be, as well." And though he watches every week all the way to the end, he still doesn't know who some of those people are.

We start off Today's Double Feature with the Mel Brooks movie that no one I know ever saw or even heard of. It's Dracula: Dead and Loving It from 1995…

And then we have Top Secret! from the folks who brought you Airplane! This is from 1984 and I thought it deserved more attention than it received…

Folks keep asking me if I've seen the new movie about the launch of Saturday Night Live and if so, what I think of it. I haven't seen it and since I'm not leaving my house much these days, I probably won't see it until it's streaming on some channel to which I subscribe. (And to answer another question which some have asked: No, I haven't discussed it with Laraine Newman either.)

Some of my friends have seen it and loved it. Others have had a very different reaction. I'll make up my own mind when I see it. But among the subset of friends who didn't like it is my longtime pal Marc Wielage, who knows darn near everything about television production and he wrote the following. I thought it made enough interesting points that you might be interested in what he had to say. Remember, these are Marc's views, not Mark's…

Somebody asked me elsewhere what I thought about the Jason Reitman's Saturday Night movie. I had a lot of problems with it. [Be warned — long post.]

1) To me, what he really created was a Saturday Night Live's Greatest Hits movie, rather than the story of how a gang of creative comedians, sketch actors, and writers came together to create a very important and influential late-night comedy show that has lasted 50 years. It was just an excuse to shoehorn in dozens of unrelated SNL bits and moments ("Save the Liver," etc.), almost all of which didn't happen anywhere near 1975. In fact, you can very truthfully say that the first October 1975 episode was very atypical; it took them 4 or 5 episodes before they "found their voice" in figuring out how the show would be constructed, week after week.

2) there are so many anachronisms in the film, I don't know where to start. Milton Berle would not have been in the building doing an NBC special on October 11th, 1975, because all the technicians would have been on overtime. He would've taped it in Burbank on Monday-Friday, 9AM-6PM, when people actually worked a regular shift.

3) They depicted a lot of real-life character conflicts that I don't believe happened on that day. True, Michael O'Donoghue had said on more than one occasion that "George Carlin was a pony-tailed vulture feeding in the corpse of Lenny Bruce," but I don't believe for one minute that he'd ever say it to his face, let alone an hour before showtime. Lorne Michaels was a very controlled, calm presence 99% of the time: he would never tear down a bulletin board and kick it into the hallway, as depicted in the movie.

4) lots of stuff was jammed into the movie that just never happened: the NBC union technicians were very good, and nobody would drop a heavy light onto the stage floor. (For one thing, the lights are double-secured in the grid with a chain, and if they fell, the chain would stop them from hitting a person or the floor.) The movie acts like many of the cast & crew were meeting for the first time on that Saturday night, when the truth is that they had been rehearsing for weeks together. The "Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute" sketch didn't appear until 1979, so again, it's completely false to pretend it was ever rehearsed in 1975. The "French Chef / Save the Liver!" sketch didn't appear until late 1978, so it would have been impossible for Lorne Michaels to be doused with fake blood on the 1975 opening show. Lorne Michaels never would have had to smash the glass of NBC's door in order to get into the building. They hire a random lighting director at the last minute because of malfunctions in the show? Wouldn't happen. The movie shows Belushi being 15 seconds late at entering for the first sketch ("Wolverines"), but if you look at the actual video for the show, he's right there in the first 5 seconds.

5) there's technical mistakes that bothered me: when they stop a VTR to look at a shot, it shows a still frame. Nope, we didn't have that capability for at least 5 more years, when the industry changed from old 2" quad tape to newer 1" helical tape. The NBC cameras were the correct RCA TK-44B's, but in the movie they're labeled "Studio 8H" on the side instead of "NBC Color," which is how NBC identified their cameras for most of the 1970s and 1980s. (My guess is there may have been a trademark problem using the NBC Peacock logo.) When they show the 2" VTRs in a room with actors, the VTRs make very little noise; in real life, they whine like a bandsaw and you have to yell if you're standing right next to them. There's much ado made of somebody insisting that a real brick floor be constructed in Studio 8H…but that never happened, because they need the entire surface of the floor to be perfectly smooth to roll the cameras and sets around. There's no need to use real bricks on TV — fake bricks look just as real from 3 feet away.

6) there was some amazing casting: Cory Michael Smith as "Chevy Chase" doesn't look that much like Chevy, but he certainly captured his arrogant, funny, obnoxious attitude; Lamorne Morris was perfect as "Garret Morris," so much that I couldn't distinguish the two from a line-up; and I laughed that the same guy who played Jim Henson (Nicholas Braun) also played Andy Kaufman — and I doubt that anybody noticed, because his performance was perfect. Gabriel LaBelle as "Lorne Michaels" was a bit more of a stretch, because he's only 25 and the real Lorne was already 31 by the time the show premiered. J.K. Simmons was perfect as the pontificating Milton Berle. But there was also some terrible casting: singer Janis Ian was only 24 years old in late 1975, and the actress playing her looked a lot older. Also, the guy they hired to play Paul Shaffer looked like he was about 40, but in real life, he was only 26. I also think the women (Gilda, Laraine, Jane) were almost interchangeable, to the point where they had to use their names in conversation so you'd know who they were supposed to be.

7) there was also incompetent writing: NBC staff announcer Don Pardo was a consummate professional who wouldn't be caught dead mispronouncing any names (as depicted in the movie). They showed a knock-down/drag-out fight between Chevy Chase and John Belushi, but the truth is their rivalry didn't build to a head for another year. They were friends at this point, and in fact, Chevy had lobbied for Belushi to be on the show (since they had both been on the National Lampoon Radio Hour in the previous years). They wouldn't wait until 30 minutes before air time to hand Jim Henson the Muppets sketch script — this would've been rehearsed 19 times over the previous few days. (But it is true that Michael O'Donoghue detested the Muppets and resented them being on the show; they exited a few months later.)

8) there's a bizarre moment where Lorne Michaels attempts to do the "Weekend Update" news himself — Michaels had actually done sketch comedy in Canada in the past few years — but at the last minute, he stops and hands the script to Chevy and says, "you know, I think you'd be better doing the news than I would." Actually, Chevy in real life says he rehearsed the news for five days prior to the live show. But it's true that Lorne thought for a day or two that maybe he should do it, but quickly realized Chevy was a better choice. The movie constantly reinforces the cast's abject terror at being on live TV in front of millions of people; but Jane Curtin says, "We rehearsed all the sketches for that first show dozens of times before Saturday, so we were all actually pretty relaxed and comfortable on opening night."

9) a lot of stuff that just plain never happened: they never "ran into" Milton Berle in the studio the night of the first show. It's true that Milton was a guest on the show in 1979, but that was 4 years after the first episode. And it is true that Berle was very obnoxious, displayed his endowment to some of the cast & crew, and was difficult to the point where Michaels ruled that that episode should "never be re-runned." (It was later included on the DVD boxed set and streaming episodes.) Also, John Belushi never walked off the show just before air time. It's true there were some nights where he was out of it or blitzed on drugs, but he always got it together and made it on the air — it's a completely false moment that never happened. (It's also true that Belushi hesitated before signing his network contract, but it wasn't as dramatic as depicted in the movie.)

10) there's a constant threat by NBC executive Dick Ebersol to run a Tonight Show rerun in place of the Saturday Night premiere, because the show is falling apart so badly up until 11:30PM. At one point, Carson himself calls the network and chides Michaels, almost daring him to fail…when the reality is that Carson wanted a new late night show on Saturday nights so his own variety show wouldn't be over-extended. I also think that generally, Carson was a fairly classy guy who wouldn't taunt people this way…at least, not before opening night. (Carson did bitterly complain to NBC by the 1980s, when SNL started making fun of him on the air.) What was more frequently done is they'd cue up a dress rehearsal tape and run it in sync with the live show, so in case there was a disaster (set falling over, actor unable to make it to the stage), they'd cut to the tape for that one sketch. And I don't think that ever happened, at least on the East coast live feed.

So to me…it's a terrible movie. If you're going to make a dramatic film about a real-life historical TV event, the rule is make it accurate, make it real, and don't shove in a lot of "cool stuff" just for the sake of making it funny. The real drama of the show was in the writers' room, it was in all the sketches that got thrown out right before air time, and the disappointment of the actors and writers who didn't get to get on the air. (We see a little of that with Billy Crystal, who famously was cut from the show and walked off, because he felt they had disrespected him.)

This is Mark with a "k" again. Without commenting on the quality of the film, I agree with most of Marc's points. I do seem to recall Don Pardo making a few on-air gaffes over the years in spite of his centuries of announcing. I doubt Johnny Carson made the alleged call but I also know that Carson was pissed at a number of things about SNL, starting with the fact that he'd been assured the new series wouldn't tap into the pool of guests who frequented The Tonight Show and then they went and got George Carlin to be the first host.

Things like the wrong logo on the cameras doesn't bother me. False dramatic content might. I've seen a lot of films like W.C. Fields and Me and Stan & Ollie that departed wildly from the true stories when the true stories would have been more interesting. Anyway, I'll see it one of these days with the hopes it'll be wonderful. I pretty much hope that any movie I spend the time (and maybe the cash) to see will be wonderful. I'm sometimes disappointed.

I forgot to mention it but Tuesday was a very bad day to be Rudy Giuliani. There have been a lot of days in the last few years when you were very fortunate to not to be Rudy Giuliani and I'm sure there are more to come. But Tuesday was an especially bad day to be Rudy Giuliani.

I've probably said this here before but I do not understand — and I do not expect to ever understand — how someone can reach a moment when he's widely respected for courage and heroism…and then become a figure who is loathed and ridiculed and losing it all and at least somewhat likely to wind up in prison.

In a way, it's like rich 'n' famous people — and we've all seen them — who have $40 million and wind up declaring bankruptcy and perhaps losing their homes. It's not like one day, you have $40 million and the next day, you're broke; not unless you went out and bet the $40 mil on the Mets. Someone who has $40 and loses it all one day goes from 40 to 39 and a few weeks later to 38 and a month or three later to 37 and so on until it's all gone. Don't you at one point think, "Hey, I've gone from $40 million to $20 million…I think I'm doing something wrong here"? Don't you suddenly feel some need to change course?

When I've discussed this in the past, I get a lot of folks telling me, "Rudy was always like this." Okay, maybe. But there was a moment when he at least had the image as a hero and a person to be admired. I guess that didn't mean anything to the guy.