News from me - May 19, 2001

May 19, 2001

MY LONGTIME (3+ decades) pal Dwight Decker has written a number of incisive articles about not only the comic book industry but its fandom, as well. One I especially liked is now available online. It's about the infamous Dr. Fredric Wertham, author of Seduction of the Innocent, a 1954 polemic on violence in the media but particularly in comic books. That book received a lot of attention that was quite injurious to the comic book industry. Less-noticed was a book Wertham published twenty years later which was about fanzines but was also, on some levels, an effective rebuttal to his own, earlier work. Anyway, here's the link to Dwight's piece. Read it and enjoy it. There's a lot more that could and should be said about Wertham but this is a good start.

TWO ERRORS oft-made by those who write about Sid Caesar's TV career are to (a) act as if it all took place on one program, Your Show of Shows, and (b) to list among its writers, folks like Larry Gelbart and Woody Allen, who actually worked on Sid's later shows. In point o' fact, Larry Gelbart never worked on Your Show of Shows. He came in on its successor, Caesar's Hour. Woody Allen never wrote on either of those shows. He contributed (briefly) to some later specials in which Caesar starred. I almost expect to see 'em get it wrong when just anyone writes about Caesar, but I'm surprised to see it reported sloppily, if not inaccurately, in the new issue of Written By, the house organ of the Writers Guild of America, West. You can read some of each issue online each month — including, currently, the article in question — at www.wga.org. (In fairness, they don't actually say Gelbart, Allen and some others worked on Your Show of Shows, but the phraseology sure suggests that.)

SPEAKING OF INACCURACIES: We have several reports today — like this article in the Kansas City Star — that the charges that departing Clinton and Gore staffers had trashed the White House, Air Force-1 and the Vice-Presidential offices were bogus. A government investigation has determined that (quote:) "The condition of the real property was consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy." If you look back at the original stories, they seemed awfully sure of widespread vandalism — a pretty easy thing to verify, you'd think — despite the fact that they were unable to show any pictures of the alleged damage or quote by name, anyone who actually saw any of it. I must say I'm unimpressed with the news stories I've seen so far that report the new findings, trying to make it sound like there was more basis for the original reports than it now appears there really was. You'd think that, in the Internet Age when almost anyone can go online and look up old news stories, we'd see more outrage when stories like this or Whitewater or Wen Ho Lee or anything turn out to not be quite as originally represented. Yeah, you'd think that...

IN A NOT-DISSIMILAR AREA: Let the record show that, as big a fan as I am of Mssrs. Leno, Letterman and O'Brien, I think they're incredibly irresponsible to be doing jokes based on the assumption that Robert Blake murdered his wife — and I say that, knowing full well that it may turn out that he did. On the other hand, now that you have O.J. Simpson going on TV to give Blake advice, I almost couldn't expect any professional comedian to resist such a tempting target.

YES, I AM AWARE that Rhino Home Video is bringing out episodes of Pink Lady & Jeff — a TV show I wrote years ago; the one that paid for my house — on VHS and DVD next month. Yes, I know they're touting it as "the worst TV show ever made." No, I don't think it's quite that bad but I do think it's a clever way to advertise it. The advertising would be even cleverer if they didn't have one of our guest stars, Lorne Greene, identified as "Pernell Roberts." (This is what Ben Cartwright gets for having a son who's older than he is...)

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