Mark Evanier's Blog, page 26

Diamonds Sometimes Aren't Forever

If you're at all into comic books, you've doubtlessly heard about the bankruptcy and sale and reorganization and major layoffs and insolvency and battles over inventory, yadda yadda yadda, involving Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc. For years now, that firm has been at the center of the network of comic book shops and other retailers…and it isn't just comic books. It's hardcover books and toys and games and other merchandise. I've received a lot of ASK me questions ASKING me what it all means, what's going to happen, will the industry survive.

I only feel confident answering that last part: Yes, the industry will survive. There are people out there who want to buy what Diamond has been distributing and there are companies that want to sell what Diamond has been distributing and that's all it takes: Supply and demand. Things will change but then they're always changing in this marketplace…

…and that's about all I know. People say I have vast knowledge about comics nut…well, not about distribution, I don't. I've had it explained to me several times by folks who might as well have been speaking Swahili for all I've been able to absorb. There are many subjects that my brain just won't allow on the premises and that's one of them. So you can stop writing and asking me about the details of what happened, what's going to happen and how it all works.

I even went so far as to call a friend of mine who needs to know all about this kind of thing and to ask him what I could or would say here. He said, "Tell 'em it'll all work out and the business will still be in business." Well, that I did know. But then he added, "It's going to take a lot of patience as everything's put back together and since so many books are printed overseas, Trump ain't helping matters with his stupid tariffs. So tell everyone to be patient and to support small publishers."

Okay. Be patient and support small publishers. And stop asking me to explain it all. I am of no help.

It's Not Vegas, Baby!

As I've mentioned on this blog, I've soured on Las Vegas, a place I used to visit so often that I briefly toyed with the idea of buying a small condo in that city and living, back-and-forth, there along with my native Los Angeles. The reason for the recent souring is a trend that started before COVID shut the town down for a while, then got worse when it reopened and tourists stampeded back, willing to pay just about anything.

It's operated on the following basis ever since: Raise the price of rooms and make them pay an exorbitant Resort Fee for each night they're there, raise the price of shows, raise the price of meals and every item in the gift shop, cut back on comps and coupons, charge people for what previously was free parking, make the games harder to win and not pay off as much when you do, etc. There is a belief that if you up the price of your buffet from $30 to $40, you will have just as many patrons and that will hold true when you later raise the fee to $50 and then to $60.

So how's it working out? Well, here's an article that starts like this…

Visitation to Las Vegas fell for the fifth consecutive month in May with occupancy rates, room rates and passenger traffic at Harry Reid International Airport all below levels in May from a year ago.

Does that mean that the public is beginning to feel too exploited; that the hotels and other businesses have gone too far? It would be nice to think that but I'd have to see more evidence. Knowing the town as I do, I think that before they'd lower prices significantly and with some sense of permanence, they'd keep the prices right where they are and start spreading around more coupons and discounts. Vegas is the kind of place where…

Well, let's say two restaurants are equally convenient and pretty much the same in terms of decor and service. One is offering a breakfast special for ten bucks. The other is offering the exact same platter for twenty dollars but they disperse a lot of coupons for five dollars off. A lot of Vegas Visitors would opt for the latter because it comes with that good feeling of getting a bargain.

It's not unlike the outta-towner who'll lose $200 at the first casino he hits, $400 at the second casino, $300 at the third one…and then at the fourth one, he quits when he's fifty bucks ahead. Then he loses a few grand more at other casinos and when he gets back home and friends ask "How'd you do?" he proudly answers that he beat Casino #4 for fifty bucks…or more likely, a much larger number.

And there's another reason it's unlikely they'll lower prices. Dolly Parton recently announced she'll play a six-show "mini-residency" at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace this December. ("Residency" is a new term that implies some sort of mega-event. No one ever plays a Vegas performance venue "over the weekend" these days. It's a "four-show mini-residency.")

The cheapest seats for Dolly were around $1,381. That's for one seat way in the back from which she's the size of an Altoid. Up front near the stage, tix were around $19,777 each. Online ticket sales opened the other day and every seat for every performance was snatched up in less than 90 minutes. In the Secondary Market — Stubhub, TickPick, Vivid Seats, those kinda websites — those tickets are now being offered for triple those amounts and up…and up and up and up. God knows what they'll be when December approacheth.

If you were the guy or gal at a casino in charge of raising or lowering prices, you might lower them when it looked like you'd have a lot of empty rooms. Empty rooms don't lose money at the Roulette table or dine in your restaurants. But you're going to take note of how much readily-disposable income the folks coming to see Ms. Parton have and assume they're not going to hesitate to pay the highest number you can think of when they dine at your steakhouse. Especially if the steak has the word "Wagyu" in its description.

Today's Video Link

From 1965: Walt Disney guests on The Jack Benny Hour…

Today's Video Link

Hey, here's another installment of Everything You Need to Know About Saturday Night Live. This installment takes us through Season 22, a season I didn't watch often, though I had a lot of friends who told me I should. I find these recaps fascinating though and it's hard to believe that the folks making them aren't even halfway through the run…

Jim Shooter, R.I.P.

Dozens of online sources are reporting the passing of comic book writer-editor Jim Shooter at the age of 73, the cause being given as esophageal cancer. That's one of those "it shouldn't happen to anyone" ways to go.

Jim had several enviable careers — writing for DC when he was a teenager…serving as Editor-in-Chief of Marvel for a long, lucrative but controversial period…launching several new companies that failed to last, etc. The details of his life are already being recounted in dozens of places across the Internet.

I've been sitting here for a while trying to decide what I could say about him and I finally decided the following; that the best course of action is to sit this one out…at least for a while, probably forever. There are enough people out there writing about him that you won't miss me.

A June Day Before July Starts

Click above and the image will get bigger

Here's a little piece of history that I stumbled across while Facebooking. It's a big card that a bunch of us signed for June Foray, the First Lady of Cartoon Voicing as some of us called her. She was a dear, sweet lady who was so, so generous with her time and talents. She had way more of both than most people have. She lived to the age of 99 years, 10 months and 8 days. That close to a hundred!

The card, as you can see, is dated 2011. June left us in 2017. The last time I saw her was a month or so before she died. A very wonderful voice actress named Julie Nathanson wanted to meet her and to tell her what an inspiration and pioneer she was. Today, there are an awful lot of women making what are sometimes very good careers in Voiceover…but June worked just about every day back when there weren't many ladies in that profession. You can see the shaky signature of one of the others on the card: Lucille Bliss, who among other characters was the voice of Smurfette on The Smurfs and way before that, the voice of Crusader Rabbit. Lucille died in 2016.

I knew June for along time and attended so many birthday parties for her that I don't remember when and where I signed this card…with a pen that was obviously running out of ink. One party for June I remember well was not a birthday celebration, just one of many tributes. It was on June 17, 1994 at the Beverly Garland Hotel out in the valley. Everyone in the animation community was in one big ballroom but almost all of us were ducking over to another room where there was a TV set. On that TV set was live coverage of the L.A. Police Department chasing a white Bronco with O.J. Simpson in it. Even June was more interested in that than in her party.

Getting back to that last visit with June: Julie and I met for lunch out in Woodland Hills, then I drove us to June's home where she'd lived since, I believe, the fifties.  It was like a museum with artifacts of her career.  To find a place to sit, you had to move huge stuffed Bullwinkle or Rocky dolls.  June was confined to a wheelchair and was getting loving care from her friend/driver/historian Dave Nimitz.  She was not working and was very unhappy not to be working but delighted to meet Julie, who said all the right things.

Almost a year to the day after June passed, we filled the Motion Picture Academy Theater with a Who's Who of the animation business and there, other people said all the right things.  She was most beloved and respected and I wrote about that night here.  If you click over there, you can see a larger version of the above photo and see a list of all the important ladies in it. They and so many more are now in the voice biz because June kicked open the door for others. I miss her so I was glad to come across the card and be reminded of who she was and all she meant to us. A lot there to think about.

Last Week Tonight Tonight

I wanted to embed John Oliver's show tonight. It's all about The Big, Beautiful Bill. But YouTube has declared it Age-Restricted which means you have to go watch it on their site. Here's the link.

FACT CHECK: The Big, Beautiful Bullshit

So…what's in this bill that Trump is insisting Congress pass? Well, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says it will make the deficit go way, way up and make the number of Americans who have health insurance go way, way down. Here's The New York Times reporting on the CBO. And here's one of their reporters, Andrew Duehren, going into greater detail about it.

Meanwhile, here's Daniel Dale over at CNN and one of his colleagues listing some of the things Trump has said about it and explaining why they're false.

And here are Politifact and Steve Benen doing more of the same.

Lastly for now, Jonathan Cohn discusses what the slashing of Medicaid will do to some people in North Carolina. This may be of special interest because G.O.P. Senator Thom Tillis — who's looking like a "no" vote on Trump's bill — just announced he will not seek another term. His seat is therefore up for grabs next year and it's one the Republicans probably need to hold onto if they're going to keep their majority in the Senate.

Another Tale From My Early Career

Mark is very busy today and when Mark's very busy, he sometimes picks out a long post from a long time ago on this blog, writes a short intro to it in the third person and then posts it here. This first ran here on April 17, 2014…

This story occurred in 1978. I was the Head Writer — I think that was my title — on a Saturday AM TV show and on this program, I'd learned the best way to get the scripts done was to not go in to work.

When I went into work, first of all, I couldn't sit around in my pajamas, unshaven and unshowered, satiating my occasional need for food by walking six yards, making a quick sandwich and taking it back to my desk to eat as I worked. When I went into the studio, I had to shave and shower and get dressed and then drive all the way out to the studio in the valley, which was 45 minutes each way — longer if traffic was bad and traffic was always bad. I had to greet people and make small talk and get dragged into meetings to discuss various aspects of the show and then someone would always say, "Hey, we have things to talk about…let's do it over lunch." Lunch was two hours right there.

I couldn't get anything written if I went to the studio. At home, I could get plenty done so I tried to go in no more than once a week. Twice was sometimes necessary.

A new writer had come on staff and he'd just handed in his first script. I thought it was very good so I fixed a few spelling mistakes and had the Production Assistant copy it and distribute copies to everyone who needed copies. The next day, I planned to not go in so I worked all day and into the evening and didn't stop there. Writing seemed to be flowing out of me at a good clip so I stayed up until around dawn, pounding away on my state-of-the-art (then) typewriter. You can work that late when you don't have to go into an office the next morning.

Or at least I didn't think I did when I went to bed close to 6 AM. At 10 AM, the telephone rousted me with one of those sharp rings that makes you just know something is serious. It was. It was the show's producer calling — a nice, bright lady who was in a state of Utter Panic. I was only about one-third awake as I asked her, "What's wrong?"

"It's this new writer's first script," she said. "I just got it and it's a disaster. An unmitigated disaster. Mark, we have a Major Crisis here."

I told her I thought it was fine. She told me it was not fine. It was a Major Crisis. In fact, it was now two Major Crises. Major Crisis #1 was that the new writer had written this unmitigated disaster. Major Crisis #2 was that the Head Writer did not see it as an unmitigated disaster. Suddenly, I was like a doctor who hadn't noticed that the patient was bleeding from all orifices. "You have to get out here right away," she said. "We have to talk about this."

I said, "I was planning on coming in tomorrow. Can't we discuss it then? This script isn't scheduled to go into production for another week or two. If there's anything wrong with it, we have plenty of time to fix it!"

The panic in her voice grew. "Mark," she said, "I feel the whole show slipping away. We need to fix this now."

I got the message. She was worried they'd not only hired the wrong new writer but the wrong Head One as well. "Okay," I said. "Keep your wrists closed. I'll be there as soon as I can." I had to. After all, it was a Major Crisis.

So I shaved and I showered and I got dressed and I got in my car and I drove to the studio which was way the hell out in the middle of nowhere and I walked into her office and I said, "Okay, I'm here. What's wrong with the script?"

She picked it up and said, "It takes forever to get started. It's dead time. Everyone's just standing around talking."

The writer had started the script with a joke — a good joke, I thought — then commenced introducing the plot around the middle of page two. I took the script from her, crossed out three lines on Page 1 and three more on Page 2 and handed it back to her. She read it over and said, "Oh, that's fine. The story gets started quicker now."

I said, "What else bothers you about it?"

She said, "That's it. I haven't read past the middle of Page 2 yet."

Evanier's Rule of Thumb: Any Major Crisis you can solve in under a minute was never a Major Crisis. It wasn't even a Minor Crisis.

A Major Crisis would be…well, let me give you an example of a Major Crisis. The script we're talking about here was for a Saturday morning series produced by Sid and Marty Krofft Productions. The particular episode revived some characters who had appeared on their 1973-1974 Saturday morn show, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters.

In '74, I was working a lot for Western Publishing, makers of Gold Key Comics. One day, I was up meeting with my editor and as I started to leave, I heard the receptionist remind him that Marty Krofft was coming by for an appointment in half an hour. I had not met either Krofft then but I'd admired the output of their operation. I mentioned to the receptionist that I might hang around the office until he got there so I could introduce myself — or better still, be introduced. I just wanted to tell him how much I liked what they did. Western was then doing a few comics and activity books based on H.R. Pufnstuf and other Krofft properties and Marty was coming by to discuss future publishing plans.

I went back to chat with Bernie Zuber, who basically constituted the entire Production Department at Western's offices on Hollywood Boulevard. Bernie was staring out the window at a huge fire — billows of ebony smoke filling the air — about a mile off. We guesstimated it was somewhere around Santa Monica Boulevard and La Brea.

And as we were guessing, the receptionist came and found me to say, "If you're still waiting for Marty Krofft, his office just called and he won't be in. That fire you're looking at…that's Goldwyn Studios. The Kroffts are taping a show there."

Goldwyn Studios was an old, venerated facility smack-dab in the middle of Hollywood. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks owned the place when it had a different name. Wuthering Heights was filmed there. So was Some Like It Hot. So was Guys and Dolls. So was West Side Story. So were hundreds of other memorable films and TV shows.

The fire had started on the set of Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. Something electrical had sparked near something combustible and within the hour, three of the studio's five soundstages were gone, along with an office building.

That's a Major Crisis.

And that's how I didn't meet Marty Krofft that day. Four years later when I went to work for him, I did and found much to admire about him and his brother, one being Crisis Management. Or maybe I should say "crisis management" with non-capitalized letters because no problem that occurred when I was there rose anywhere near that level. But there were problems. Freightloads of problems. Most of the projects I worked on for them were variety shows and producing a variety show is basically an exercise in dealing with one problem after another after another after another. Sid and Marty and the kind of people they already employed proved to be real good at coping with problems…solving most, working around those that couldn't be solved. The producer lady who had the moment of panic I described above was pretty good at it, too. Just not all the time.

I hope some of that rubbed off on me but I did get a lesson the day she dragged me out to the Valley because one script got off to a slow start. The lesson — and I'm sure you knew this but I can be real dumb at times — is that the first thing you have to do to solve a problem is to accurately and unemotionally gauge its size and scope. Big Problems require Big Solutions. Little Problems need Little Solutions.

If you try to solve a Big Problem with a Little Solution, it won't work. The problem is bigger than the solution. If you try to solve a Little Problem with a Big Solution…well, that might work but it's likely to create other problems because you have Too Much Solution. It's like if you tried to kill a cockroach in your kitchen by rolling in a Sherman Tank. You might crush the cockroach but you might also crush your stove, your refrigerator, your cleaning lady, your box of Rice Chex, your tuna-noodle casserole, etc.

One day, early in my days with Sid 'n' Marty, Sid got to talking about the fire. It was in no way his or the company's fault but he felt bad about the headaches it had caused everyone. No one was injured but many tenants of that office building had lost treasured personal items. But then he got to recalling the funny aspects of that afternoon — like Rip Taylor in the grotesque make-up he wore on the show, carrying Billy Barty in his Sigmund costume to safety. There were also all the technicians and crew members and puppeteers and little people fleeing out onto Santa Monica Boulevard to escape the flames. That he could laugh about it now, just four years later, and smile at how everyone had helped everyone else was a very good sign.

On that first show I did for them, a Fire Marshal came on the stage to make certain our sets were non-flammable, which they were. He had been around for the Sigmund experience, before and after the fire, and he told me he was amazed how well the Kroffts and their entire staff handled matters, valuing people over property…and then, with all of their sets and most of their costumes lost, bouncing back and finishing production on the series so that no air dates were missed. "I've worked a lot of fires," he said. "And the first thing you learn is that the panic often does more damage than the fire."

That's a good thing to remember…and you can minimize that panic if you don't treat the minor crises of life like major ones. Of course, that means being able to tell the difference.

Today's Video Link

Here at newsfromme.com, we love barbershop quartets…or any group singing a cappella. And no, this is not a video of one or more people singing "For the Longest Time." We also love TV theme songs, especially TV theme songs from shows for kids. We are therefore way-too-pleased to present a group called The Ashatones Barbershop Quartet singing, sans musical accompaniment, a whole lotta themes from shows for a younger audience…