Mark Evanier's Blog, page 151

Today's Video Link

I've recently been watching a lot of episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show on a 24/7 Dick Van Dyke Show channel on Roku. In the next few days, I'll be writing something here — I'm not sure what or when — with some new thoughts about my favorite TV series. In the meantime, here's a blooper reel from the show. I think these are all from first season episodes and a few seconds from an I'm Dickens, He's Fenster seems to have snuck in as did a photo of a naked woman…

ASK me: Lorenzo Music

From Bruce Bennett…

I like to watch old sitcoms, especially the well-written ones, and after seeing a particularly good episode of The Bob Newhart Show, I noticed Lorenzo Music happened to write it. I also remember that Steve Martin mentioned him in an interview about the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, where he wrote a lot for Pat Paulsen, which was some of my favorite stuff from that wonderful series.

So my question is, did Lorenzo Music stop writing comedy after becoming such a successful voice actor playing "Carlton, Your Doorman" on Rhoda, and then Garfield the Cat? You wrote Garfield. Did he ever make suggestions for storylines or dialogue with you? Or was he satisfied to be just a voice artist?

Lorenzo was a much-praised, very successful writer-producer before transitioning into (mostly) a much-praised, very successful voice actor. He didn't stop writing completely but a lot of his later writing was the kind he described as "for myself." He was a co-writer on one of the prime-time Garfield specials before I got involved with The Cat but he never suggested any storylines to me.

As for dialogue, yes. He didn't do it often but sometimes, he would ask me if he could rephrase a line to make it funnier and I probably said yes every time. Most good voice actors do at least a little of that. Lorenzo was very sharp and he'd had years of fine-tuning dialogue for comedy shows so as to wring all possible mirth out of a speech.

I should explain that on many cartoon shows — including all the ones I've voice-directed — the actors do not get the scripts in advance. On Garfield and Friends, I spent every possible moment writing and rewriting. I even sometimes rewrote during a session after I'd heard the lines read.

There are other ways to do it but the way we found worked best would be that we'd hand the actors a script for a cartoon and I'd assign the roles of non-recurring characters. In addition to playing Odie, Gregg Berger might also do the voice of a policeman or an alley cat. The scripts merely had the dialogue — no description of what the characters were doing in each scene — so I'd walk the actors through the script: "On line 22, you're falling down a flight of stairs…on line 23, you crash into a live goat…"

Then we would start recording. There was no point in rehearsing since we'd just do it over and over until we all thought it was as good as it was ever going to get. If a script was ten pages, we might do the first three until we were happy and then do the next three and so on. Our cast was amazing and a lot of what made it onto the air was the first time we did it. Some of the seven-minute cartoons were recorded in under fifteen minutes. As I explained back in this post, a guest star might occasionally be stunned by how short a time they were there.

So Lorenzo didn't have a lot of time to study the script and think of ways to improve it. From the moment my assistant handed him a script to the moment the engineer said "This is Take One" was about five minutes. But he was very fast and very funny and that was more than enough. And since I'm talking about Lorenzo — and because I miss the guy — here's a photo I've run here before of the two of having lunch at one of his favorite (but now defunct) restaurants…

Lorenzo is on the left, of course. And the reason I have that odd look on my face is because, I suspect, I just realized that the restaurant served nothing but cole slaw. No wonder it went out of business.

Today's Video Link

The latest from Randy Rainbow…

From the E-Mailbag…

I received an e-mail the other day and started writing a response to it. A strong sense of déjà vu swept over me and I thought, "I've written this reply before!" It only took a little digging to find what I was remembering. I received a message about pretty much the same thing from a different person. Here is that message and here's what I wrote in response here on October 20, 2010…

Here's an excerpt from another one of those messages from someone who's not making much money as a professional writer and wants some advice. I don't claim my advice is worth more than anyone else's but if you want to heed it, I won't stop you. In the following, I've redacted a long list of projects that the author sees as inarguable dreck. I cut it because the discussion really isn't about those works and because a couple were written by friends of mine…

…the thing that gets to me is that I watch TV and I read comics and I see work being bought that is so obviously inferior to what I do. It wouldn't bother me so much if I thought I was being beaten out by better people but some of the shows today like [LONG LIST DELETED] just stun me. My wife is sick of hearing me screaming at the TV set or throwing down some comic I brought home from the shop. I could cope with the rejection if I felt the contest was fair and that the judges didn't have their heads up their butts. How do you think I should deal with this?

By ignoring it. Really. The field in which you and I are working is a flawed meritocracy. It's all about the best work rising to the top…and sometimes, it does. But we've all seen studio heads greenlight the wrong movie, network programmers buy the wrong series, publishers publish the wrong manuscript, etc. That is never going to change and to get mad at it is like getting mad that your favorite baseball player sometimes strikes out.

Actually, I should back up here and note that when you see, for example, a TV show where the writing seems to suck, you are not seeing the writing the writer did. You're seeing his or her work after it has been through a process…perhaps rewritten by others, certainly interpreted by actors and a director, changed or skewed by many hands. It is entirely possible (in some situations, almost probable) that your wonderful script could endure that process and by the time it hit the air, it would be no better than what you're decrying…and some frustrated writer would see it and his wife would hear him yell about how being rejected when that kind of debris was selected. A writer-friend of mine who left us too soon, Bill Rotsler, used to have a saying that came to mind as I typed the above. It was, "Those who think they are the exceptions are wrong."

But even if rotten work is getting bought, don't let that anger you. In fact, don't let anything in this area anger you. Being mad can be one of the best ways to not get hired. There was a writer I used to run into at Guild functions and committee meetings who couldn't utter two contiguous sentences without one of them being about the crappy show he saw last night and how in the name of all that's holy does that garbage get bought when his brilliance goes unbought and unproduced? Having never read one word he's written, I honestly have no idea if he truly was as good as he seemed to think…but I do know that if I were in a position to hire writers, he's about the last guy I'd consider. Who wants to work with a screaming maniac?

There was a time in my past when I used to think of other writers as competition, as if the successes they enjoyed somehow subtracted from what was possible for me. When I stopped thinking that way — stopped caring about how well someone else was doing at all — I got a lot happier as a writer…and, I think, a little better. I have tons of flaws and shortcomings and weaknesses but that was one I was able (I think) to get rid of. It involved a realization that the system isn't "fair" in the way we'd like it to be. The buyers are not going to always select the best writers any more than the voters are always going to select the best candidates. Stop expecting otherwise and just do your best work…because the system doesn't always fail.

Building Blocks

Not long ago, the legendary "CBS Television City in Hollywood," which was not really in Hollywood, was sold and largely shut down. I hear there are still some tapings (which are not really on tape) there but most or all of the offices have been vacated, most of the studios are like ghost towns, The Price is Right is being done at an old warehouse out in Glendale, etc. It's just a matter of time before the entirety of what was CBS Television City is displaced by a new, gigantic complex that will combine offices, television studios and retail outlets.

Folks who live nearby (Full Disclosure: I am one) are concerned that what's planned is waaaay too big for that piece of real estate, especially given that traffic is already bad with what's there now. The plans of the developer, Hackman Capital Partners, have been scaled down a bit due to the objections of locals but there is currently a crusade to get them to scale back more…a lot more.

No one, as far as I can see, is objecting to them redeveloping and expanding the facility. I'm not sure in this town, anyone could. There seems to be an understanding that the needs of everyday citizens must never get in the way of someone making a movie or a TV show. If someone wants to shoot a film on your street, there will be only minor controls placed on how many roads they can close, how much noise they can make, how much they can complicate your access to your property. A year or two ago, just a few blocks from me, some movie was setting off explosives in the street.

The film/TV production company will always get most of what it wants because, you know, they're good for the economy. Never mind that you can't get to work.

What it used to be.

I have no doubt Hackman Capital Partners will get all or most of what they want and I strongly suspect the original proposals for all developments of large scope are drawn up to include sacrifices. They want what they're building to be the size of Mars so they announce it'll be the size of Venus. Locals will protest, the company will agree to cut their plans down to the size of Mars and the protesters can be satisfied with that seeming "win." You know how that works.

According to the protesting group in this matter — The Neighbors for Responsible TVC Development — the plans for the corner of Fairfax Avenue and Beverly Boulevard where TV City is/was currently call for a facility of 1,724 million square feet. The protesters are calling for Hackman to eliminate — this is how the group describes it — "a whopping 550,000 square feet of office space unrelated to studio operations." There will be a public hearing tomorrow about this.

I'd go and try to say something if I could but as you know, I'm kinda confined to my home at the moment. I'm going to "attend" instead via Zoom and if you want to learn more about all this, this is the website of the group.

They believe as I do that the current plans are just too friggin' big for an area where traffic ground to a standstill just with James Corden and some actors running out into the intersections to do snippets of his Crosswalk Musicals. I hate to think what adding thousands of drivers trying to get to work there every day will do. If it was all built now, I might not be the only person in the area physically unable to leave his home.

Today's Video Link

Hey, here's a clip from the last season of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In when our friend Frank Welker was briefly a cast member. Frank was then still an on-camera comedian who was occasionally doing voices for cartoons. He would soon go almost-full-time into the voice world and become the most-hired-and-heard guy ever in that profession…

From the E-Mailbag…

Jim Held wrote…

Fun to see you posting some of the early Bob Hope stuff. Too many people only know him from the wax dummy that was trundled out to reel off unfunny one liners in front of his TV specials.

Seeing him dancing with Cagney and doing comedy from that period and earlier reminds me of the strong virile and funny Bob Hope of the fifties and sixties and of the classic comedy movies. Great physical comedy and good comedy writing. Dick Cavett and others were always in awe of his comic timing. He seems to have survived later reports of his horn-doggery around women and his well-hidden dislike of Bing Crosby.

Carson reportedly said of the older Bob Hope: "If I ever get that old, shoot me." But Hope is his prime was pretty amazing — a Star. I for one am grateful. Thanks for the (Good) memories.

Hope would never have attained his stature and longevity without delivering the goods earlier in his career. I really am kind of baffled as to how much he should be respected because for the last few decades, he was kind of regarded as a major star in spite of his performances. He was hardly the only comedian of his generation whose later years somewhat canceled out his earlier years.

There are a lot of online articles that say Johnny hated Bob Hope. I don't think it was hate so much as a discomfort that he kept having to have him on to promote those specials…and to use Johnny's studio audience. Bob would "borrow" Johnny's studio audience to record his monologue and closing a day or so before the air date of a special, the rest of which had been recorded a week or three earlier, sans live audience.

I perhaps should not write this but I suspect that if Hope had been born a decade or so later and behaved as he did, he'd have been indicted by the "Me Too" movement and his career would have had a somewhat disgraceful ending. As it was, he sure left a lingering bad impression with some just for what he did in public.

I've recently had conversations with a couple of different friends about performers who keep performing well past their prime. On the one hand, it's sad that they leave such bad impressions behind. On the other, some of them really seem to need that reason to get up in the morning and to try to stay healthy and to get some love from audiences and/or still being famous. I have seen older comedians get way older because no one seemed to want them, no one seemed to remember them.

Mr. Carson, having witnessed the senior years of Hope, Berle, Groucho, Benny and others seems to have valued leaving his legacy relatively intact over hearing applause to his dying day. Carson's longtime producer Fred DeCordova told me that Johnny was very conflicted when a Berle or Benny (especially Benny) would call him personally and say "Hey, you haven't had me on your show for a while. How about next Tuesday?" He felt he wasn't doing them any favors by having them on as a favor. In a few cases, he had them on and regretted it.

I asked DeCordova, "Did he ever turn one of them down and regret it?" Fred said, "Yes, it was kind of a no-win situation." He declined to elaborate.

Today at the Trump Trial

Following this case, it helps to remember that we're mostly getting our accounts from (a) reporters who were in the courtroom and (b) newsfolks in studios who are basing their views of what's going on in the courtroom by listening to reporters who were in the courtroom. And ultimately what matters will not be what either group thinks. What matters is what the ladies and gentlemen of the jury think.

All the accounts of the folks in the first two groups say it went well today for the prosecution, not so good for the defense. But this is direct testimony that has been more-or-less rehearsed. It's supposed to go well. The question is how things will go when they get around to cross-examination…but even then, we'll only get the perceptions of the folks in those two groups that don't count.

I have to keep reminding myself of these things. In the process, I may keep reminding you of these things.

Today's Video Link

Let's start the week with a Three Stooges short — and not just any Three Stooges short. This is Micro-Phonies which most Stooges scholars — yes, there are such people — would tell you is one of their best short films…

Coming Soon…

It's going to be a rough week for those of us who are trying to not follow every little report from the Trump Trial. Trump's former lawyer, "fixer" and executive liar Michael Cohen is taking the stand, probably today, surely by tomorrow. There were a lotta fireworks when Stormy Daniels testified but her testimony wasn't about the issuance of checks, which is what this case is really about. The judge in the case said, while Ms. Daniels was on the stand, he could hear Trump muttering curse words. When Cohen's on the stand, we all oughta be able to hear Trump swearing like a comedian with an HBO special and Tourette Syndrome — and this, without a microphone!