I used to title these items "Set the TiVo" but I no longer set a TiVo so I'll have to come up with a different subject line. I'm recommending, though I have not seen it, Defending My Life, which debuts tonight on HBO…and come to think of it, maybe you don't have to set anything and snag its first airing because it'll be streaming all over the place for a while.

It's a film by Rob Reiner profiling his best friend, Albert Brooks, one of the funniest men who ever turned up on TV and movie screens. Need I say more? I don't need to but I will. When I'm asked what show or presentation made me laugh the most in my life, it was an evening when I got to see one of the last times Albert Brooks stood on a stage and did good, old-fashioned stand-up. It was mostly just him telling stories from his life and I hope Mr. Reiner got him to tell some of them in this film.

The documentary is 88 minutes and it includes interviews with many of his peers telling us how hilarious Albert Brooks was and is. If I made a film like this, I would just point the camera at Albert Brooks for 88 minutes, let him talk and everyone could see for themselves how funny the man is. The two negative things I might include are that, first of all, after Brooks exploded on the comedy scene, there were an awful lot of terrible, terrible comedians trying to do what he did.

One of the things that made him unique before others tried to replicate it was that he'd come out on stage and do a deadpan, not-funny-at-all three-minute set-up for the bit…and then there would be a hilarious two-minute pay-off that was way more than worth the wait. Others who attempted this only managed to get the first part of it right.

And the other negative thing is that he stopped doing stand-up, stopped performing in one. I love most of his films and he's certainly the best judge of what he should be doing. But if you'd been at that late (maybe last) performance I saw, you wouldn't blame me one bit for wanting more. If you're still using a TiVo, set it.

It's been a while since we took a look at the list of long-running shows on Broadway and a few things have changed; mainly that Phantom of the Opera, which we often predicted here jokingly would never close has closed. It still has the Number One spot though and will for some time. The revival of Chicago, which most Broadway pundits were sure would close first, is still running and it's only 3,420 performances behind Phantom.

A Broadway show typically does about 400 performances a year but if Chicago does continue on for another eight and a half years, it might claim the top spot.  (The shows in boldface are the ones that are still running.)

1. The Phantom of the Opera – 13,981 performances
2. Chicago (1996 Revival) – 10,561 performances
3. The Lion King – 10,179 performances
4. Wicked – 7,718 performances
5. Cats – 7,485 performances
6. Les Misérables – 6,680 performances
7. A Chorus Line – 6,137 performances
8. Oh! Calcutta! (1976 Revival) – 5,959 performances
9. Mamma Mia! – 5,758 performances
10. Beauty and the Beast – 5,461 performances
11. Rent – 5,123 performances
12. Jersey Boys – 4,642 performances
13. The Book of Mormon – 4,575 performances
14. Miss Saigon – 4,092 performances
15. 42nd Street – 3,486 performances
16. Grease – 3,388 performances
17. Aladdin – 3,347 performances
18. Fiddler on the Roof – 3,242 performances
19. Life with Father – 3,224 performances
20. Tobacco Road – 3,182 performances
21. Hello, Dolly! – 2,844 performances
22. Hamilton – 2,789 performances
23. My Fair Lady – 2,717 performances
24. Hairspray – 2,642 performances
25. Mary Poppins – 2,619 performances

As you can see, Hamilton will soon pass Hello, Dolly!, The Book of Mormon will soon pass Jersey Boys, and Aladdin will soon pass Grease and 42nd Street.

Worth noting is that Disney has four shows in the Top 25, whereas Stephen Sondheim, Neil Simon, Richard Rodgers (with or without Oscar Hammerstein) and Mel Brooks have a combined total of none, though if this was a Top 30 list, The Producers would be on it.  Andrew Lloyd Webber has two shows on the Top 25 list, both in the Top 5.  And not one of these shows ever had Nathan Lane, Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, Audra MacDonald or Hugh Jackman in it, though every night at Lion King, the guy playing the meerkat is probably doing an impression of Nathan.

Also worth noting: All the shows on this list are musicals except for Life With Father and Tobacco Road.

The oddest presence on this list would seem to be the revival of Oh! Calcutta!, a show that no one liked in this version or the original.  Why this ran so long is pretty obvious: It had naked people in it.  Also, it was a very cheap show to put on with a cast of eight, none of whom probably got over scale and it was in a small theater.

The theater was The Edison, a converted ballroom inside the Edison Hotel. It only had 541 seats and I once heard an actress who was in Oh! Calcutta! there say that they could show a profit if the place was half-full, which was often accomplished by booking tour groups, often from other countries. Even then, she said, they had people walking out in mid-show most nights and once in a while, they played to less than 50 people. Eventually, so few seats were being filled that the show closed. A few other plays inhabited the theater but they didn't last long, possibly because all the actors in them were clothed…whereupon the Edison Hotel turned the theater back into their ballroom.

So that explains why that show ran as long as it did. How though do we explain why The Phantom of the Opera lasted longer than the expiration date on a box of Wheat Chex? Perhaps if we're willing to invest two hours and forty minutes watching this video, we'll get a clue. This is a performance of Phantom done in 2011 at the Royal Albert Hall. It was jazzed-up with extra production value and a larger-than-usual cast and orchestra, plus special appearances…all to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the show. Still, whatever made this juggernaut a success is probably in there somewhere…

This commercial for Shasta Orange Soda ran incessantly on TV around 1977. A lot of folks who saw it thought, "Hey! That's Barry Williams from The Brady Bunch!" But I couldn't watch it without thinking about the crummy rhyme. They got the rights to an old song — or maybe it was public domain, I don't know — that went…

I'm looking over / A four leaf clover

…and they changed it to…

You're looking over / An orange soda

…which doesn't rhyme. "Over" and "soda" do not rhyme. They never have. They never will. You can't even mispronounce one of them, Bert Lahr style, and make them sort of rhyme. You could, however, change it like this…

Come get a load a' / An orange soda

Even better, they could have done…

My soda has ta / Be Orange Shasta

When I first heard this commercial, I thought of that in maybe five seconds. Half the people reading this could have done that in approximately the same time and Sondheim could have done it in two. Why did no one involved with this commercial think of that? Or if someone did, why didn't they use it? I don't drink soda anymore but when I did, I always insisted that the jingles rhyme.

I get a lot of spam calls on my phone and normally, if a call comes in and I don't recognize the number, I may not answer it.  But I'm waiting for a somewhat important call from someone who'll be calling from a number I won't recognize and when this person's secretary phoned me the other day to arrange this call, my iPhone identified her call as a "Spam Risk."  So just to make sure, I answered every call yesterday and decided to keep a log of them.

Yes, I know that answering these calls can make it more likely I'll get more of them in the future. But I really don't want to miss the important call and since I block and report the ones that aren't the important call, I figure I'm helping to bring down their occurrence. Every one of these calls came from what appeared to be a different number…

• 5:41 AM — This one I missed because I was asleep. Fortunately.
• 8:12 AM — I'm up for this one but there's no one on the line. As I understand it, when this happens, it can mean one of two things. One is that it's a "phishing" call intended only to see if someone will answer at this number and if so, they include that number on a list they sell to telemarketers. Or some telemarketers use a computer program that dials several numbers at once and then the telemarketer talks to whichever number is answered first, then the other numbers that are dialed get dead air.
• 9:02 AM — Michael from "Advanced Orthopedic Medical" calls to say they've received an "online indication" that I have serious back problems.  I tell him I have no back problems and I ask him where he got this "online indication."  He says they also have an "online indication" that I am diabetic.  I ask again where these "online indications" come from.  He hangs up on me.
• 9:03 AM — Another call with no one on the line.
• 9:30 AM — "Eliza" finally calls. Usually, I hear from her before nine. Eliza is a robo-calling computer voice — a sweet, friendly-sounding lady who goes by many names and fronts for a wide array of companies that I suspect are all the same company and it has as many different names as she does. She tells me she is with "Elder Care" and reminds me that it's Open Enrollment time for various health plans including Medicare. Should I be interested, she will hand me off to one of their agents — a live person, I presume — to discuss my insurance needs. I've been meaning to talk to one of those agents just to see what their hardsell is all about but I'm on another call — a real one — at the moment so I just hang up on Eliza. Next time she calls back, I may stay on the line long enough to get the entire pitch. If I know Eliza, it won't be long.
• 9:52 AM — A non-medical call!  Evan from A.C. Care calls to offer me a great deal to have his company come by and clean out all my air-conditioning ducts.  Evan sounds like he's in a boiler room full of other callers and his accent suggests English is not his first language and maybe not even his second or third.  I tell him my home has no air-conditioning and therefore no ducts that need cleaning out — and that's true. I would never lie to Evan.  He is very polite when he thanks me for telling him that and he apologizes for wasting my time.
• 10:21 AM — Another call with no one on the line.



• 11:36 AM — A robocall with the recorded voice of a man who sounds like he has a lot of testosterone in his veins.  He says he's calling on behalf of the National Police Association and that's where I terminate the call.  As I understand it, the scam here is that the organizations that sound like they represent law enforcement and ask for donations are private concerns that get away with that representation as follows: They do solicit funds on behalf of the cause they represent but then they only pass along a smidgen of the money they collect to that cause, retaining the rest for their own expenses.  They could be sending 1% or less.  The same deal is apparently true of a lot of the spam e-mails I get asking me to donate to Donald Trump or various right-wing causes.  They keep 99% or more of the money as their collection fee.   Even if I wanted to fund a crusade to lock all Liberals up in prison, I wouldn't do it that way.
• 11:37 AM — And no sooner do I hang up on the bogus police guy than I get another one of those calls with no one on the line.  The phone numbers in the Caller IDs are different but I'm wondering if it's the same computer dialing me.  Back-to-back calls like that happen a lot.
• 12:00 PM — A noon-time mystery call from no one but my phone said it was a "Telemarketer."  I'm starting to get worried about "Eliza."   This is the longest she's gone in the last week or two without calling me.  I hope she's okay.  If I had her number, I'd call and ask her invasive questions about her health.
• 2:34 PM — Emma (a live person) calls from…well, she mumbled the name of her company but they do plumbing and heating.  She offers me a free inspection of my central heating system.  I tell her I don't have a central hearing system…and that's a true statement but she calls me "Liar" and hangs up.  Sounds to me like someone is not happy with their own life choices.
• 3:19 PM — No one on the line.
• 4:16 PM — No one on the line.
• 4:43 PM — No one on the line.
• 4:51 PM — "Eliza" finally calls again except now she is "Sophia" from Elder Care. Same voice, same delivery, same everything…and I'm wondering why they think folks who won't talk to someone named Eliza will talk to someone named Sophia. Does it occur to them that if I keep getting the same call from a lady who keeps changing her name, that makes the whole thing seem like more of a scam? If she'll lie about her name, what won't she lie about? Anyway, it's good to know she's still speaking to me even if I do keep hanging up on her.
• 5:02 PM — "Eliza" calls again and this time she's back to being "Eliza."  I wish she'd make up her mind.  I hang up on her.
• 5:24 PM — It's "Eliza" again and she's making up for ignoring me since her earlier call.  This time, I answer the few simple questions she poses and she says she'll connect me with one of her supervisors.  Ten seconds later, Steven (a live person) comes on the line and says, "Good afternoon, sir.  I hope you're having a fine day."  I tell him, "I am but it'll be better if you can tell me how I can stop getting these phone calls."  Steven immediately hangs up on me.  I wonder if Eliza knows she's working for such a rude person.

All in all, it was a rather normal day on the spam call front. I wish I'd received that important call so I could stop answering the phone every time it rings.

Lord Vinheteiro — the man who stares at us like he resents us watching his videos — plays the ten most overplayed piano pieces. He then offers to teach the ten most overplayed piano pieces to us so we can overplay them even more…

Stephen Sondheim owned two homes. He had a seven-bedroom townhouse on East 49th Street in the Turtle Bay Gardens section of Manhattan. And he had a country retreat, a three-bedroom estate in Roxbury, Connecticut which is located 65 miles northeast of New York City.

The townhouse on East 49th went up for sale last July and has since been purchased but the online realtor listings gave us a chance to peek inside. Now, the home in Roxbury has gone on the market. You can tour it on this webpage.

I insist that the next Republican Presidential Debate be moderated by Justin Peters.

I have a couple of otherwise-sane friends who keep talking to me about the price of gasoline as if I can do something to change it.  I understand the need to sometimes vent about something that's bothering you.  I've done it here and will do it again but with some, talking about gas prices is getting to be like bitching constantly about gravity.  Isn't it awful that when I throw something into the air, it doesn't stay there?  It keeps coming back down, damn it!

Kevin Drum said the following as he was writing about the G.O.P. debate last night…

[Moderator] Lester Holt wanted to know what everyone would do to get prices down, and he wanted no tepid mush. He wanted to know what they'd do on DAY ONE, dammit. The answer for all of them was: gasoline. They would do…….something…….to get the price of gasoline down, which would put money in everyone's pockets. None of them acknowledged the basic fact that oil prices are set globally, which means that none of their proposals would have any effect. Nor did any of them seem to realize that the real price of gasoline is down very nearly to its pre-pandemic average.

But of course they said that. The price of gas pisses off just about every American and unless you own part of an oil company, it feels like it would involve no sacrifice on your part to rectify the problem. So it's a very safe answer. Some of the other problems might cost someone something to solve.

I only watched a little of the debate but what I saw reaffirmed my belief that a part of Trump's continuing popularity with his party — and maybe not a small part — is that they don't see anyone they can imagine as an alternative candidate. Some of those people don't look like they even have a 50-50 chance of winning a coin toss.

The only candidate up there I thought "won" the debate in any sense was Nikki Haley who seemed to be the only one who, in light of election results the night before, felt the party needs to change the way they talk about abortion. The fact that she was the only one there who could possibly ever have one did not go unnoticed…but I will get the Republican nomination for President before she will. And so will you.

While searching my cluttered hard drive for some info on It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World for a post here the other day, I came across a JPG of this newspaper clipping…

Some of you may be thinking, "Jackie Mason? Barbara Heller? I don't recall either of them in the movie!" That might because they weren't in the movie. Jackie Mason was originally signed to play one of the gas station attendants but it turned out that his schedule was so full of club dates and bookings that they couldn't know if they'd have him when they needed him. I got the impression from Stanley Kramer that he thought Mason's agent had misled them about his availability. Anyway, Mason was replaced.

Originally, the two gas station attendants were to have been Mr. Mason and Joe Besser but Besser was then a regular on The Joey Bishop Show, a sitcom at the time. Mr. Bishop would not allow Mr. Besser the necessary days off to be in Mad World so he was out. I think the way it worked was that Arnold Stang was hired to replace Besser and then a little later, Marvin Kaplan was hired to replace Mason.

Rumor has it that Ms. Heller was signed to play the wife of Ben Blue, who played the airline pilot…a role ultimately played by Bobo Lewis.  But there were a lot of scenes cut from Mad World — some filmed, some not — and she might have been in or intended for one of them.

And speaking of people who were cut from the film: When I showed you the Jack Davis poster in this posting here, I meant to point out the officer on the ground below the car driven by Milton Berle. That was Allen Jenkins, a character actor probably best known for voicing the character of Officer Dibble in the cartoon show Top Cat…which also featured voices by Stang and Kaplan. A photo of Mr. Jenkins was in the souvenir book for Mad World sold at the roadshow engagements but he was cut from the movie just before its release.  He apparently played a policeman or sheriff.

And I haven't figured out where Herbie Faye might have been in the movie.  Faye, seen above with his long-time friend Phil Silvers on Sgt. Bilko, is in several stills taken during the desert scenes in Mad World. It's unlikely he would have schlepped out there in 105° heat just to say hi to Phil. Whatever he did never made it into the movie. He had to be content to guest star on just about every sitcom of the sixties and about half of the funny movies made in that decade. In show biz, he went back to the days of burlesque when he was First Banana (lead comic) and Phil Silvers was Second Banana (supporting comic).

There were others who didn't make it in…and before someone asks, as people seem to do hourly on Facebook, about Don Rickles: Don Rickles was never going to be in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and the reason he was never going to be in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is that when the film was casting, he was still an unknown, especially in the comedy world. He didn't even appear on The Tonight Show until 1965.

It's Legal Eagle Time! Devin Stone explains why Alex Jones may actually have to cough up a large wad of that money he owes the families of the kids in the Sandy Hook horror. I tend to feel sorry for a lot of people some of my friends tell me no one should feel sorry for. I have no trouble not feeling sorry for Alex Jones.

By the way: Some of the same folks have told me they enjoy Mr. Stone's lectures more when they use the YouTube feature that allows you to slow down the video a bit.  Look for the little gear icon in the taskbar that appears once you start playing a video.

There are two ads in this video.  If those annoy you, consider watching Legal Eagle the way I do…with a subscription to Nebula.  His videos there have no ads, they often include extra comments and they occasionally post a video there which never turns up on YouTube and therefore never appear on this site.  There are lots of other interesting things on Nebula also.

As you've no doubt heard, the SAG-AFTRA strike appears to be over. Various officials within the union need to ratify it as does the general membership but those appear to be formalities. And of course, the outcome is a deal that the union could have accepted on Day One if management had merely offered it then. That's how these things always go but of course, the folks who make zillions of dollars a second running the companies have to play their little power games and lose a lot of time and money doing so. It's one of those things that never makes any sense but they do it anyway.

The way registration for Comic-Con works is that some portion of the available badges is put up for purchase as "Returning Registration," meaning that if you attended the last con, you can purchase badges for this one. This sale is then followed by "Open Registration" on another date and on that date, anyone can try to purchase badges. Later on, there may be additional (but limited) opportunities but those two dates are when most of the badges that are going to be sold are sold.

Returning Registration was last Saturday and the anecdotal reports I've heard said that it went smoothly. That is not to say that everyone who wanted badges got them but the ones who got them seem to have gotten them with a minimum of stress and frustration. There will always be those who are unable to score badges because of simply math. The convention center can hold X number of people and the number of people who want to attend is more like ten times X. Or more.

Open Registration takes place Saturday, November 18, 2023 commencing at 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time. The Virtual Waiting Room opens an hour before that. You can find out more on this page and on this page. Our friends over at The San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog have written up their own unofficial guide that may also be helpful and you can read it here.

I would recommend digesting all this information well before the day, especially the part about having a Member I.D. in advance. I would also recommend keeping in mind that this is basically a lottery and not everyone can win. Until such time as the convention becomes a lot less popular — like, say, when I achieve my Master Plan to someday host all the panels and making sure every one of them is about Groo — there will always be way more people who want to attend than the con can accommodate. Just remember: It's not Real Life. It's Comic-Con, Jake.

And you probably will be able to get into WonderCon — run by the same people but it's smaller. That's at the Anaheim Convention Center from March 29 to March 31 next year. Badges for that will be on-sale soon.

Three quick items and then I have to get back to a Groo story…

1. As you've probably heard, voters in Ohio have just decreed that their state constitution should make it clear that women have the right to control their own bodies even when it means getting an abortion. I think this is a very good thing and I also think that it's not just because it's the right thing to do but because, while there are many folks out there who are sincere in their view of when life begins, there are also a lot who feel that the so-called "pro-life" movement these days is not about child-rearing and pediatrics but by fund-raising and politics.

2. The "open enrollment" period for insurance plans in my state has turned into a flurry of spam calls — about 80% of the "robo" variety. Most try to sound like they're from Medicare and all wish to connect me with agents who can sell me whatever they can sell me. I think I got about 40 of them today, starting with one that came in this morning at 6:22 AM. I happened to be up then so I answered it and found a real, live human being, evidently in some other country, who seemed shocked that someone answered. I told the person that if I ever got my hands on them, they'd be the ones who needed a hospitalization plan. Then I went back to bed and slept through the next six calls.

3. In the post before the post before this one, I put up an image of one of the great posters that Jack Davis created for the movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. My buddy Scott Shaw! sent me a better scan of that image so I have swapped them out and put his in its place. Thanks, Scott! Buy his book!

See you when things settle down here. Soon, I hope.

Here's something kinda interesting: David Grudt sent me an image of an ad that ran in the Hollywood Citizen-News on Thursday, November 7th, 1963. It ballyhoos the premiere that evening of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and offers tickets by mail order, which is how many tickets were purchased for "roadshow" movies in those days.

For those who don't know: A roadshow movie was one that debuted in one theater only in a given city and it ran at that theater for a long time, often more than a year. Mad World ran at the Pacific Cinerama Dome for fifteen months.

You bought tickets for them the same way you bought tickets to a Broadway show — reserved seats for a future date purchased by mail or at the box office or through a ticket agency or one or two other ways. These tickets cost more than admission to your local movie theater that was showing a double feature…and as you can see, a seat to Mad World could run you as high as $3.50!

Roadshow films were usually long, big budget productions with intermissions and they usually sold a souvenir book in the lobby. They also cleared the house after each showing because the next showing didn't start immediately and someone else had bought a ticket that would put them in the seat you have to vacate.

The ad would make you think that seven days a week, they had one showing at 8 PM except on Sundays when they started at 7:30. Then on some days, they had a matinee starting at 2 PM and on some nights, a midnight showing at Midnight. But I have here a schedule for this theater that's dated two days before the premiere and it specifies four showings a day — at 11 AM, 2:30 PM, 6 PM and 9:30 PM — though it doesn't say that they did this every day. Nothing on it about midnight showings, no showings starting at 7:30 PM or 8:00. I have no idea why this does not match up with the ad.

The list of celebrities attending the premiere — some of whose names were misspelled — is interesting because there are forty-six stars named but only four of them were in the movie — and two of those were the masters of ceremonies for the evening. There's plenty of news footage and many photos showing other actors from the film at the L.A. premiere and I think there may have been two evenings promoted as premieres.

Also I note that Peter Falk, who was then relatively new to the business, got his name in the ad but Eddie "Rochester" Anderson didn't even though Falk had pretty much the same prominence in the picture. I don't think that's a racial thing. Falk just probably had a better agent.

And that's about all I have to say about my favorite movie on this, the 60th anniversary of its opening. I wish some theater in Los Angeles — especially the Cinerama Dome — was showing it tonight. I can always watch my Blu-Ray (or my DVD or my VHS copies or my Beta copy and if my Laserdisc player still worked, I could watch my Laserdisc, plus it's on a couple of streaming channels…) but as I often say, the way to see this movie is on a big screen with a big, enthusiastic audience. I don't seem to have either in my den at the moment.

60 years ago tonight, my favorite movie opened at what was then called the Pacific Cinerama Dome in Hollywood — a theater that was literally built to show this movie. Now it's just the Cinerama Dome, part of the Arclight complex and it's been closed since the Pandemic closed a lot of things. The theater has been extensively remodeled during this time and I keep hearing rumors — in one case from a very good source — that it's about to reopen and that it will immediately (or soon after) show It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. So far, those rumors have been wrong.

As I've written here before, I saw that film there on November 23, 1963 and my life changed a little. Actually, the life of just about everyone changed the day before but mine also changed the next day…in this case, for the better. If and when I can see it again at The Dome, I intend to go for what will be my umpteenth viewing. I always enjoy it and I always notice something new I'd never noticed before.

Sixty years is a long time. The only cast member who's still with us is the lovely Barrie Chase who just turned 90 but in a way, everyone in it will live forever in the hearts of us who love this movie. I'm 71 but the next time I see this movie, I'll be 11 years old again. I'm always 11 years old when I see it except sometimes around the knees where I'm 71 or, some days, a couple of years older.