I had thought I convinced them to leave this one in Harvey Pekar: Conversations (available now for purchase), darn it. This one is Harvey interviewing himself in his comic book. The odd typesetting is an attempt to replicate the way it was printed originally. This is amusing because Harvey talks about never working for DC, but 20 years later they were his publisher.
Oh well. Print it out and tuck it in after Mike Barson's interview from Heavy Metal.
The Situation as of 9-20-85
From American Splendor #11, 1986. Reprinted with permission of Harvey Pekar.
To what extent were you involved in the production of the stage version of American Splendor?
Not at all. See- here's what happened. My wife you know knows the Bishops (Conrad Bishop is the Independent Eye's artistic director). The way she knew them—she used to work in the Delaware state prison system, and they did some programs together there for the inmates. And so when we got married, she sent them copies of my books, uh, you know and Conrad liked the stuff, and he thought he would possibly like to make a stage production out of it. So I talked to Conrad about it, and we seemed to be in general agreement about how to handle the material. And so, you know, really I had — I don't think I have anything to lose by him doing it, and possibly something to gain, so I said, "Sure. Why not?" That's how I became involved.
Why did you start the book, American Splendor?
Well, simply because it was just too difficult to get published in those days on a regular basis any place. And I had ideas that I didn't want to sit around for 25 years before I saw it in print. So I, uh, I just, uh, I mean I-I don’t known if you’ve ever read my books, but, uh—
(Interviewer): Uh, no, but I just bought some. I can’t find them in this area…
The once-a-year thing was just a matter of—that's about how long it takes to get the stories. It's a 60-page book, and that's about how 'long it takes to get the stuff illustrated. That's one reason. Another reason is I'm currently losing money on the book and have been on every issue, and I couldn't you know I can – I couldn’t — sustain the losses. I can recover from losses on one book a year, but I couldn't do it for two books. So there's a couple of practical reasons. You know, it just evolved, it just sort of evolved out of these circumstances and became a once-a-year book.
When I did the first one, I had no idea if or when the second one would be coming out, or even if I would call it another name instead of American Splendor. But the title--I don't know--I like it and people liked it, and so I just kept.it, and I just kept calling it number two and number three and stuff like that.
Have you had any offers from the big comic companies like DC or Marvel, or if you would get such an offer, would you consider it, considering that their product is mainly superheroes?
First of all, do you know I'm getting a contract, that I've signed a contract with Doubleday to get a 160-page trade paperback book, an anthology of stories from the first through the ninth book, that'll be coming out in April?
As far as the Marvel and DC thing, you realize how unlikely it is that they would offer me anything. It's almost like totally—I don't know—I've had contact. I haven't asked anybody there to do anything for me, but I've had contact with a few people at both companies. I mean, it's out of the question. They know my work, and some of the people over there--maybe a lot of them for all I know—liked it, but it's like asking some publisher that puts out these gothic romances to put out my comic books. I mean, it's like, yeah, they're books, they're both books, but there's a big difference between a plumbing textbook and a book of poetry.
And I think Marvel and DC--their comics are a lot more commercial than maybe you'd like to get into.
Yeah. Well, I mean it’s just –it’s much—you know – it’s true what I used to say – “form.” As a – uh – as a, as a, you know what I mean—My book is a comic book in form but not in content, and that means a typical comic book in form but not in content. In other words, by that I mean that the book is—I use balloons and panels and stuff, but as I said in the interview in The Comics Journal, people have traditionally used comics in a very limited way, when there's no reason for that. So when people think of comic books, they just think of like maybe a few genres actually, instead of when you say a novel, you want to know what kind of a novel. There arc all kinds of different novels. But when people say, "comic books," they think about some costumed superhero or maybe a talking duck or- something. But there's not really much variety in straight comics, and alternative comics are not easy to find or anything.
It's conceivable that what happened to comics could've happened to any art form; that is, if the people who employ the art form had just only wanted to do one thing. But in movies, at first the stuff they did was confined to rather narrow limits, but then eventually, guys were making movies about just about every subject and doing all kinds of things and affiliated with all kinds of artistic schools. If they had just stayed with, say, cowboy movies and slapstick comedies and something like that, the people would probably think movies are junk.
Do you think the play will help the sales of the book? Do you think it's good publicity?
It certainly won't hurt it. I mean, of course, I mean obviously you see an example here – you bought some books. But I mean as far as whether this will be just a local-uh-I mean, you know - you - you know, the book, I mean. The play got some very nice reviews in the morning and afternoon papers here, so that might stimulate some local interest in Lancaster, but Lancaster's not—this is not a real large theater, and Lancaster's not a real big community. So even if they like me a lot here-and I appreciate it if they do—it's not going to make a big impact on my standard of living or anything like that. But on the other hand, if it's a big Broadway hit or something like that, obviously it would help. You've just got to more or less use a rule of reason to think about the question. If it's a big national hit or something like that, it helps you, you know. But it's okay. It's great. I've been having a good time out here, and I've been treated very, very well, and I've been out here just today and yesterday, but I've had a great time, and that's worth it.
I'm not concerned about money that much, because I've got a steady job. I can live on the income. I'm not that greedy, you know. It just so happens that what I want can be purchased for relatively little money. What I want is a lot of books right now.
Is there a particular reason why you do the books autobiographically?
Yeah, there's a reason why I'm dealing with them autobiographically, because what I want to do is write about everyday experience, and I think that everday experience has a huge effect on people—the accumulation of everyday experience. Everyday experience has been ignored by far too many writers, and I wanted to write things that people could identify with, write about experiences that people could say, "Oh yeah, I knew that kind of guy," or "I went through that." I didn't want to write about generic experiences. I wanted to write about particular experiences, and I can write about because I think if you write about the particular rather than the general, it's much more specific, much more believable. So if you write stuff that's true, as accurate as possible, I think -- my work, anyway — has a chance to have much more impact on people.
When people invent fictional characters, I mean they're not really fictional, in a sense. There have been any number of novels, I suppose, that have been written where most of the material has been factual, except the names have been changed. But maybe a person's been a compilation, a character of a novel's been a compilation, of two people that a guy knew, and maybe he's fit the parts together badly, so that the character's implausible. I don't have to run that kind of risk doing the kind of thing I'm doing. So that's my rationale.
Obviously, not everybody thinks like me. Obviously, there are all sorts of different ways to write good stories, good novels, but I give you the reasons for why I do what I'm doing. This is the method I've evolved. In order to attain my goals, I employ autobiographical writing, and the reason that I employ autobiographical writing is –you know – I gave you the reasons – you know – it’s you know – so that – you know - it would be easier to identify with, so it would have a greater impact on people, stuff like that. Other people—I don't know. I can't speak for any other writer. I just speak for myself. I haven't talked to other guys about why they do this or don’t do that.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query that darn. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query that darn. Sort by date Show all posts
Saturday, September 06, 2008
Monday, March 02, 2020
Onward's story head Kelsey Mann really loves his job at Pixar
Kelsey Mann loves his job. He emphatically made that point several times when speaking to an audience at George Washington University’s Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. The head of story for Pixar’s new animated movie Onward was in Washington last week to promote the movie and talk to students (and a few local cartoonists) about it. After his presentation, I got to speak with him for several additional minutes and ask some questions which follow at the end of this story.
His voice rasping from previous interviews and class presentations, Mann spoke to students for an hour about his career and his work in shepherding the development of Onward’s story. Two young elves, Ian and his older brother Barley Lightfoot, lost their father before they formed any memories of him, but a magic spell promised to bring him back to them for twenty-four hours. Unfortunately, the immature magic of Ian only brings back part of their father – from the waist down. The movie becomes a quest to reunite him with his whole body and his family before the day runs out.
As the head of story, Mann was involved from the beginning of the project, one of the few people who were with the movie from beginning to end. However, his journey to working at Pixar took quite a few detours. He grew up in Minnesota, majored in illustration in college and started working in animation. He began in Minneapolis in a small studio and got to wear many hats. He applied to Pixar and moved to Los Angeles around 2000, but they turned him down. “I knew that was where I wanted to be, so I worked in small studios doing Flash animation for the internet. While I was doing that during the day, I would take night classes in illustration. I finally got my big break and became a story artist.” After working in various places, he was with Cartoon Network for five years, but moved to the San Francisco area to work at Lucasfilm including on Clone Wars in the Star Wars universe. Nine years after first applying, he finally got a job with Pixar.
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| Photo by Bruce Guthrie |
“Monsters University was my first film that I worked on. I had worked on Newt for six months, but they ended up shelving it. I became the story supervisor on Monsters University, very quickly moving up the story ranks, which blew my mind because it had been so hard to even be a story artist at the studio. I never thought that I would ever have this job.” After directing a short, Party Central, also in the Monsters world, he worked on the story for The Good Dinosaur. Wrapping up his career overview, Mann said, “I’m the story supervisor on Onward, and I’m here to answer ‘What does the story department do?’ I’m going to answer it very specifically because each director works differently.”
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| Dan Scanlon, director of Monsters University and Onward |
For the three people at the beginning, Mann, Rae and Scanlon, the movie began “in a blank empty story room with intimidating white walls and blank boards.” The story team uses index cards with ideas written on them, “trying to fill the walls with something to react to…Working out possible beats of the story from the beginning to the end of the movie. “ Scanlon was both a writer and the director on the film, and other people were added to the team to work on the script. “A lot of people think we just get the script as story artists, and we just go and draw it, but there’s a lot of working in the story room with the writer and director, helping to shape the story that we have to do.”
The story artists gather in a room Mann called the Fish Bowl (because it looked out onto the atrium of the building). Mann pointed out a unique physical feature of creating Onward, something he had started on The Good Dinosaur. “I had noticed how the smaller the studio was, the more interaction we had because we all sat in one room. The bigger the studio got, the more people went into their offices and didn’t talk to each other. Something about that felt wrong to me, especially with the story team where the collaboration is so key to the films we make at Pixar.” He noted that the team worked in the collaborative room, received their handouts, and made their pitches for the storyboard animation they created. A smaller group would work in the story room more directly on the script. “Once we had the beats of what we needed to happen, then Dan and Jason [Headley, the other writer] would go off and make a pass at the script.” The small group would then mark it up, “literally page by page.”
“Whenever Dan felt the scene was ready to go, we would hand it out for story art,” Mann said. The story team working under him were the first people to read the words, “trying to absorb the scene that they’re eventually going to storyboard.” Meanwhile Mann and the story manager spend a lot of time organizing the work. “I’m a creative filmmaker, but a lot of my job is organization. I need to know what everyone is doing.” At this point, Mann showed a complex weekly chart of how scenes are assigned and when the animator will create a first pass and ‘pitch’ their suggested art for the scene.
Mann has everyone do that pitch in one room and at one time, noting “It’s great that I can show Dan a chunk of the movie, not just a slice.” He continued, “Once the artist has read the script, and figured out a plan and gotten it done, then we all gather in that fish bowl. Everyone is welcome at any time and we do all of our handouts in the fish bowl. On some shows, artists get handed a scene and they are the only ones present. We wanted to make sure everyone was present for all the handouts so they knew what their colleagues were doing.” Scanlon would read the scene out loud, as the reading is recorded, so the artists can refer back to his comments and voice. At times, the director would act out the motions he saw the characters doing. The scene that Scanlon described was the two characters looking across a gaping bottomless chasm, with a drawbridge on the far side. Mann would return to this example again and again to show how the scene evolved.
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| photo by Bruce Guthrie |
“Collaboration is so key to the stories we make at Pixar,” he feels, and the fish bowl is the closest animators can get to being on a set of a film. The story team ended up doing 97, 759 storyboards for Onward. When an artist has a scene ready to pitch, the story team gathers in the fish bowl and the animator performs the script and sound effects as the storyboard animation projects so everyone can see it. Mann demonstrated the boards for the bottomless chasm, and people clapped for his performance, which did put me into the movie. He noted that, “It is tradition to have applause at the end of a pitch. There’s a bit of performance here. Hopefully, you’ve forgotten about me and you’re not looking at me. You’re looking at the movie and that’s our whole job - to road test the movie and see if it’s working or not. And that’s before Dan starts.”
The process becomes iterative at this point with the scene possibly being redrawn, artists being ‘scratch’ voice actors, and then the entire scene with temporary sound, scratch voices, temporary sound effects and basic art screened several times until the story works. Eventually the animated storyboards for the whole movie are strung together into a basic preliminary version of the movie. Parallel with the story development is some visual development, but throughout this time, the characters and backgrounds aren’t finalized and the animators aren’t working on it. “It’s not until about screening four until animators start building the characters in 3-D.” Onward had eight internal screenings, once every three months, throughout its development. “We’ll watch in the theater. Screening is a big day and we fill the audience with people who are on the crew and people who are working on other movies, because we want a fresh perspective.” When the movie is getting closer to a final vision, it’s seen by the Brain Trust, the creative leaders of the company, and studio head Pete Docter, who get together and make suggestions about the version they’ve just seen. “It’s all just advice. What’s great about the Brain Trust is that we don’t have to blindly do what they tell us to do. If they presented a solution, isn’t doesn’t mean we have to do that solution. They’re trying to solve a problem so we want to identify the problem they’re talking about. We’re only there for two hours and we can’t solve everything in that meeting.” For weeks after the meeting, emailed comments come in to one of the writers, who reads and aggregates the suggestions, and then the story team starts all over again. Responding to a question about storyboard artists working with the final animators, Mann noted “The movie is really made in the in the last year or year and a half of the process, and we’re on this thing for six or seven years. Most of the story artists, when the movie begins to get made, aren’t on the show anymore. We’re trying to get more overlap with the story team and different departments. Layout is the next department after us. They’re the first ones who take our storyboarded scene and start to put it in a 3-D environment and start to block it out.” Mann tried to get the story people work with the layout people to solve potential problems as they arose. |
| The audience gathers for a group shot (photo by Bruce Guthrie) |
ComicsDC’s Mike Rhode and The Hilltop Show’s Alexandra Bowman were given an opportunity to speak directly with Mann after his public talk.
AB: What does it mean to be head of story at Pixar?
KM: It’s a big job. I’m on the movie for a very long time, so it’s a commitment. With this one, I was involved from the very beginning and went all the way to being at the final mix review at Skywalker Sound. At any point, we can improve the story, or break it. I worked together with [director] Dan [Scanlon] on Monsters University and was the story supervisor on that, so we have a long history. My primary job is to oversee the story artists through the storyboarding process, which is us taking the written strip and visualizing it. We’re the first ones to draw the movie and we draw the blueprint of the film and road test, for lack of a better word. Until we’re happy with it and it gets approved and goes into production.
MR: Is this a traditional role, or is it evolving as more animation is being done?
KM: It’s been around for a very long time. Maybe the duties are evolving over the year. It changes from director to director. I worked with Peter Sohn on The Good Dinosaur, and there’s some similarities but there’s some differences. It depends on the director and what they need from their head of story.
MR: How did you personally get the job? You’ve alluded to your organization skills.
KM: I’m my known for charting. People will say, “Kelsey with his beautiful minding of things…” I’m a visual person so I’m always drawing things out on the whiteboard. I do it because it’s how I think, but also do that so everyone’s on the same page. If I draw something in front of everybody, it’s really clear. The first time I did the job was on Monsters University. We had a different director at the time, and Dan was the head of story. I was a story artist at the time and we got along really well. He didn’t even know me, he just brought me on, and we got along instantly. I think he likes working with me because I keep an optimistic attitude. I want to be accountable, loyal and if I say I’m going to do something, I follow through with it.
AB: What do you think separates Pixar from other animation studios?
KM: There’s so much good stuff being created these days. It’s not only movies, but it’s television, streaming … so much great stuff is being created now. I think what probably sets us apart is how the directors are asked to tell something personal. Something that’s really meaningful to them. This film is pretty darn personal because it’s about Dan and not knowing his father. Dan’s dad passed away when he was six months old so he has no memory of his father. He has an older brother, three years older, and Bill doesn’t remember their father either. Dan thought about how that’s shaped him, and what he’s learned about who he is, and thought ‘What if there’s a character that had a similar experience? And what if that character had an opportunity to spend one day with the person they had lost? I would want that.’ And that’s where this came from.
MR: It seems like Disney mostly adopts existing stories where Pixar tells stories from scratch and that seems to be one of the differences between the studios. Would you say that people gravitate to one studio or the other because of the types of source material?
KM: Pixar never will buy a property and make a movie from it. It’s a director-driven studio so it always comes from the director and what they want to say.
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| photo by Bruce Guthrie |
KM: We always want to make our movies. What we want to do in the future is to entertain the audience. We want to make a fun entertaining movie. We want it to have a heart and a reason why we’re making it, and about being alive. That usually comes from a really hard question that maybe the director can’t even answer themselves. Another thing we really want to do is surprise the audience. There’s a lot of [films] out there, and we don’t want to repeat ourselves. Pete Docter calls it ‘something unexpected.’
MR: The movie seems to have a curious parallel to Coco where a young boy is searching for his father. Did that ever come up?
KM: No. We hadn’t thought about that too much. We go to each other’s screenings to make sure we’re not repeating each other, but that was never a concern. I don’t remember the Brain Trust saying anything. I do remember early scenes of Toy Story 4 opening with a unicorn flying, and I was like, “Wait a minute. That’s what we’re doing.” They went away from that though.
AB: Do you have words of career advice for students who attend liberal arts schools like Georgetown or schools that don’t’ focus on art?
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| photo by Bruce Guthrie |
KM: I always tell people it takes three things to get a job at Pixar. The first is passion. You have to love the heck out of this. Love movies and have a really deep, deep passion. Don’t tell any of my bosses, but I would do this job for free because I love it that much. That kind of passion. That leads me to the second thing – hard work. It takes a lot of hard work. I worked really hard. It took me nearly ten years after my first rejection letter from Pixar. But that hard work was a little easier because I was so passionate. A lot of times the hard work cuts people out because they really don’t have the passion for it. The last thing is luck. It takes a bit of luck and timing. You have to be prepared for when lightning strikes. You have to have your portfolio ready.
MR: Following up on the hard work thing for this particular movie, as head of story, how many hours per day are you working at the height of the storyboarding process?
KM: It’s a lot. My days are really full. They start at nine and they end at six. That’s a standard day. We always work through lunch. Dan would rather work at lunch than stay late, and I agree with that. I want to drive home and kiss my kids goodnight. If I have to put in extra hours, I do it in the morning because no one is around. I’ll go in early, but I try to stick to those hours. We’ll do the occasional Saturday every once in a while, right before a screening. Every three months, we’ll do a Saturday, but it’s only 10am to 1pm. Not that terrible. At the past studios I worked at, you’re pulling pretty late nights but Pixar cares about your health and the longevity of your career so they don’t want to injure you. Other places… they didn’t care so much.
AB: How did John Lasseter’s departure affect you and the company?
KM: Wow. That was an interesting time not only in the world, but at Pixar. It was definitely a change because John did a lot for the studio. I wouldn’t have a job if it wasn’t for what he and everybody else did at the studio. I’m really proud of Pete Docter… we’re both Minnesota boys. I grew up in a town near him and he stepped up to be our chief creative officer. He’s really great, because he’s sharing. The amount of weight he has to carry leading this studio creatively is too much for one person. Pete says, “I don’t want to handle all of this. Take a little of this weight,” and I’ve seen Dan step up and be a leader not just on this movie, but in the studio. It’s an exciting time.
AB: There hasn’t been a Pixar Bronze age. You haven’t had your Black Cauldron moment.
KM: Yeah, I don’t want to have that moment.
MR: We were wondering what happens when a project gets shelved.
KM: Newt was weird, because that’s when I started at the studio and I didn’t know the difference between something going great and something not. All of a sudden, they shelved it, and I was like, “That’s a thing? We’re done? That’s it?” It’s typically after a screening that they’ll make a call on it and they called us all in a room and said they decided to shelve the project. It’s a hard thing. Part of working in story is being a problem solver, and I think of it as a Rubik’s cube that you’re trying to solve. Then you’re told to put that cube down. And then it’s on the shelf and you have to walk away and be okay with it.
AB: Did the shelving of the project have anything to do with Rio and the similar premise?
KM: No, not from my knowledge. Again I was early in my career there so I wasn’t privy to conversations behind closed doors, but the story wasn’t working. It wasn’t because of any other projects. It’s always hard. In any creative endeavor, when you try to invent something, something always pop up. Maybe it’s a new Netflix show with the same idea as yours. It’s amazing how that happens. You just have to say, “I’m going to keep going forward and I’m going to do the best that I can.”
MR: When something is shelved, do you ever resurrect any part of it for a later movie? Did anything you had done for a previous movie that didn’t make it end up in Onward?
KM: I can’t think of anything that came from another property. On Monsters University, sometimes we’d resurrect old gags from Monsters, Inc. There are so many great ideas that get cut, not because they’re not great ideas, but because they’re not right for the story. Part of my job as head of story is to oversee all the ancillary material and so I just have this card catalog in my head of all these cut ideas. I’m busting them out constantly when they are doing a novel that’s a side story or an activity book.
AB: In a themed movie like Monsters University with its college theme or Onward with its medieval theme, how do you draw the line with a reference, or obvious gag, or a trope, or an homage?
KM: What was interesting about this film is that there’s a lot of fantasy out there. We wanted to make sure that the movie is appealing not only to the people who really know fantasy but also to the people who could care less about it. That’s what we want the film to hit. I think about that in casting the crew. I make sure I have people that could care less about fantasy, and then I put in people who love the stuff. Austin Madison and Louise Smythe were our two fantasy experts on the story team. I helped organize a group of us that we affectionately called The Fellowship. It was a collection of people, not just in story but in all departments, that really knew their fantasy. Across different aspects – some people knew novels, some people knew movies, some people knew role-playing games. We always had this group so when Dan had a question about fantasy and needed an idea, or a name, or something, he would say, “Take that to the Fellowship. See what they think.”
MR: I saw one press piece on Yahoo where an article was about a character referring to her lesbian daughter. Was that part of a story conference from when you were working on it, or did someone come in and say we’d like an LGBTQ+ reference?
KM: Lena Waithe plays (Officer Spector) the character that you’re referring to. Those two characters are police officers and were originally male when we boarded them. We want to make sure it’s a diverse cast, not only in male to female ratio, as balanced as we can make it, but also in diversity. Diversity is really huge. Noah Klocek is the production designer and his team did so much work to make sure all the species were as diverse as they could be and the casting was that way too. We knew that this movie, a fantasy film told in a modern setting, and we wanted to make sure it reflected the modern world. That’s a diverse world. That was an idea that came up later and we didn’t want to make a big deal about it. We wanted to have one tiny little line and just reflect the way our world really is.
I'd like to thank GWU's Naomi Rothwell and Kirk Kristlibas and my friend photographer Bruce Guthrie for making it possible for Alexandra and me to attend this talk and meet Mr. Mann afterwards. I'd also like to thank Mr. Mann who was extraordinarily gracious and forthcoming at the end of a long day.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Weingarten's chat on 38-year-old Dennis the Menace panel
Gene Weingarten's chat yesterday had quite a bit on a 38-year-old Dennis the Menace panel and it's possible racism.
The cartoon is here.
The poll based on the cartoon is here.
Here's Weingarten and his chatters on the cartoon. For what it's worth, Weingarten's right, the gag is ok, but just ok.
Missing Option in Survey: The first question does not provide an option for those of us who didn't find the cartoon offensive in the slightest.
Gene Weingarten: We don't care about you.
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Postraci, AL: I can't imagine the cartoonist intended the Dennis piece to be hurtful, but it is hard to believe that in 1970 someone could be so ignorant and/or oblivious as to be unaware that this was in bad taste. In comparison, consider the character of Franklin in Peanuts who was introduced about the same time, maybe even a bit earlier. Clearly black, but drawn and scripted without any stereotyping characteristics at all.
Gene Weingarten: Franklin debuted in 1968. The amazing thing is that his race was, to my memory, never mentioned. He was just another Peanuts kid.
It was an intelligent and gracious act by Schulz. He once got a letter from a southern newspaper editor asking him not to put Franklin in a schoolroom with white kids.
Franklin always sat in front of Peppermint Patty in the classroom. Schulz never changed that.
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Race Relatio, NS: It was 38 years ago, which puts me in high school, but I remember that cartoon. I don't think I remember any other Dennis the Menace cartoons, since it was the Garfield of its day, still running in a lot of newspapers though never funny, clever or insightful at all. I remember my jaw dropping. I could visualize it even before using the link to confirm my memory.
By 1970, we'd come a long way since Amos and Andy were played by white guys on the radio in the 30s. All in the Family premiered just one year later, with George Jefferson as a regular character, so the sensibilities of the times had most certainly passed Hank Ketchum by even in the cultural arena. And this was seven years after the I Have A Dream speech, and two years after Memphis. It was appalling then, and it's appalling now.
Gene Weingarten: It was appalling then, yep. Ketcham had to issue an apology, though it was grudging and half-hearted. See next post.
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Curacao, Netherlands Antilles: The absolute worst thing about that comic in the poll is that it JUST ISN'T FUNNY.
I mean the punchline is delivered in such a way as to totally trip over the joke. I mean that if it were delivered correctly, the joke can't even aspire to a "Family Circus" level of lame humor. I mean that even if I were like a KKK member or something, I wouldn't see the laughs in saying "This other kid runs faster than me!"
The only way that joke works is if you find the drawing laugh-worthy. Since I found the drawing horribly offensive, I hope you'll agree with me that this may well be the unfunniest strip I've ever seen on the comics page.
Gene Weingarten: Now, I disagree with this, and with most of you in the poll.
I believe that if Ketcham had drawn Jackson as a normal kid, this cartoon would have not only been acceptible, but pretty darn good. A worthy punchline, and one with a little bit of a social punch.
I'm not sure I've seen, or would have seen by then, a joke relying on confusion between "race" as ethnicity and "race" as running. Imagine a slight tweaking of this comic:
Let's say that Ketcham had drawn it -- as he has been known to do -- in two panels, not one. And in the first, Dennis says that he has a "race" problem with Jackson (again, who looks normal.) And in that first panel, Henry Mitchell looks concerned. And in the second panel, Dennis elaborates: Jackson runs faster than he does, and Henry looks relieved.
Pretty good comic! Raise the specter of something bad, defuse it, make the point that kids don't see race. That is actually what Ketcham was ham-fistedly TRYING to do, though he failed spectacularly.
But even without the two-panel treatment, the joke would have been the same, had Ketcham drawn this thing with a modicum of sensitivity.
What you would be left with was the question of whether it was insensitive to trade in the racial stereotype that black people run faster. I think I could have defended that, because that interpretation would be in the mind of the reader.
I know. Y'all disagree with me on this.
_______________________
Dennis: Gene, people don't disagree with you on the comic. People aren't getting the pun.
Gene Weingarten: Is that it? Did people not get the "race" pun?
_______________________
David Mills: I do kinda disagree, Gene... except that your two-panel alternative improves the joke a whole lot. It also improves it as social commentary, becoming about the father's discomfort.
Gene Weingarten: Right. True. I still think it would have worked, though. Just less well.
The cartoon is here.
The poll based on the cartoon is here.
Here's Weingarten and his chatters on the cartoon. For what it's worth, Weingarten's right, the gag is ok, but just ok.
Missing Option in Survey: The first question does not provide an option for those of us who didn't find the cartoon offensive in the slightest.
Gene Weingarten: We don't care about you.
_______________________
Postraci, AL: I can't imagine the cartoonist intended the Dennis piece to be hurtful, but it is hard to believe that in 1970 someone could be so ignorant and/or oblivious as to be unaware that this was in bad taste. In comparison, consider the character of Franklin in Peanuts who was introduced about the same time, maybe even a bit earlier. Clearly black, but drawn and scripted without any stereotyping characteristics at all.
Gene Weingarten: Franklin debuted in 1968. The amazing thing is that his race was, to my memory, never mentioned. He was just another Peanuts kid.
It was an intelligent and gracious act by Schulz. He once got a letter from a southern newspaper editor asking him not to put Franklin in a schoolroom with white kids.
Franklin always sat in front of Peppermint Patty in the classroom. Schulz never changed that.
_______________________
Race Relatio, NS: It was 38 years ago, which puts me in high school, but I remember that cartoon. I don't think I remember any other Dennis the Menace cartoons, since it was the Garfield of its day, still running in a lot of newspapers though never funny, clever or insightful at all. I remember my jaw dropping. I could visualize it even before using the link to confirm my memory.
By 1970, we'd come a long way since Amos and Andy were played by white guys on the radio in the 30s. All in the Family premiered just one year later, with George Jefferson as a regular character, so the sensibilities of the times had most certainly passed Hank Ketchum by even in the cultural arena. And this was seven years after the I Have A Dream speech, and two years after Memphis. It was appalling then, and it's appalling now.
Gene Weingarten: It was appalling then, yep. Ketcham had to issue an apology, though it was grudging and half-hearted. See next post.
_______________________
Curacao, Netherlands Antilles: The absolute worst thing about that comic in the poll is that it JUST ISN'T FUNNY.
I mean the punchline is delivered in such a way as to totally trip over the joke. I mean that if it were delivered correctly, the joke can't even aspire to a "Family Circus" level of lame humor. I mean that even if I were like a KKK member or something, I wouldn't see the laughs in saying "This other kid runs faster than me!"
The only way that joke works is if you find the drawing laugh-worthy. Since I found the drawing horribly offensive, I hope you'll agree with me that this may well be the unfunniest strip I've ever seen on the comics page.
Gene Weingarten: Now, I disagree with this, and with most of you in the poll.
I believe that if Ketcham had drawn Jackson as a normal kid, this cartoon would have not only been acceptible, but pretty darn good. A worthy punchline, and one with a little bit of a social punch.
I'm not sure I've seen, or would have seen by then, a joke relying on confusion between "race" as ethnicity and "race" as running. Imagine a slight tweaking of this comic:
Let's say that Ketcham had drawn it -- as he has been known to do -- in two panels, not one. And in the first, Dennis says that he has a "race" problem with Jackson (again, who looks normal.) And in that first panel, Henry Mitchell looks concerned. And in the second panel, Dennis elaborates: Jackson runs faster than he does, and Henry looks relieved.
Pretty good comic! Raise the specter of something bad, defuse it, make the point that kids don't see race. That is actually what Ketcham was ham-fistedly TRYING to do, though he failed spectacularly.
But even without the two-panel treatment, the joke would have been the same, had Ketcham drawn this thing with a modicum of sensitivity.
What you would be left with was the question of whether it was insensitive to trade in the racial stereotype that black people run faster. I think I could have defended that, because that interpretation would be in the mind of the reader.
I know. Y'all disagree with me on this.
_______________________
Dennis: Gene, people don't disagree with you on the comic. People aren't getting the pun.
Gene Weingarten: Is that it? Did people not get the "race" pun?
_______________________
David Mills: I do kinda disagree, Gene... except that your two-panel alternative improves the joke a whole lot. It also improves it as social commentary, becoming about the father's discomfort.
Gene Weingarten: Right. True. I still think it would have worked, though. Just less well.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Hoo-hah! Pekar book news and an unused piece by Harvey
My buddy John Lent, editor and publisher of the International Journal of Comic Art called today and told me he had my Harvey Pekar: Conversations book in his hand. I argued with him because the press just emailed me that it would be out in November. He insisted and eventually I conceded - he's got an advance uncorrected proof. Darn! A collectible I don't own!
Harvey's working with DC Comics now - the first miniseries American Splendor: Another Day was just collected and is some of his best stuff. Vol. 2 is out as individual comics, and you can find them on Amazon or at a local comic book store.
I called Harvey and let him know the book's becoming more real and also asked his permission to republish some of his stuff that the Press cut from the book on this blog. Here's a 1987 piece Harvey wrote about being interviewed by David Letterman. I didn't even try to get permission to use those interviews. It appears here courtesy of and copyright by Harvey Pekar. Print it out and put it in the appropriate place in the book, after the 1987 interview by Henry Allen of the Washington Post:
Late Night of the Soul with David Letterman
Harvey Pekar / 1987
From The Village Voice, August 25, 1987, pp. 45-46. Reprinted with permission of Harvey Pekar.
Compared to many artists I'm in good shape. I've got a civil service job in Cleveland that pays me enough to write and publish, without making compromises, a comic book called American Splendor. In April '86, Doubleday issued an anthology of my work and it received gratifying critical response. Then, last summer, an assistant producer from Late Night With David Letterman contacted me about making an appearance on the show. It turns out that Letterman's head writer is from Cleveland and had recommended me as a guest. I was scheduled for October 15 and told, "Above all, don't get too serious."
Trouble was, I'd never been on TV. I knew nothing about Letterman except that he was a renowned put-down artist, and had no idea what to expect. I figured it'd be a one-shot; I'd answer a few questions and go home. All I wanted to do was sell a few books and avoid embarrassment.
I guess I'm jaded—I live in Cleveland and I've seen it all—so I wasn't surprised when Letterman started asking me these dumb questions, like "How are things in Cleveland?" They were so silly I started giving him incredulous looks and ridiculing him, saying he was a show biz phony and complaining about the lousy money he paid ($100 for the first appearance). The audience ate it up. Here was this sour faced, sloppily dressed file clerk turning the tables on Mr. Condescending Wise Guy. Letterman, who's, off camera, a quiet, thoughtful man, held me over five minutes and publicly asked me to return.
They raised the amount I got for the next show to $490. That plus free plane rides and a hotel room for my wife and myself made doing Late Night again worthwhile. I wasn't selling out, was I? The thought bothered me, and, as my next appearance, on January 6, approached, I began to consider injecting some substance into my slapstick act. For some time, I'd been reading disturbing reports about the state of affairs at NBC, which, with the rest of RCA, had been purchased by General Electric in December '85. GE sent their man Robert Wright over to assume the NBC presidency in September '86. Wright quickly made his presence felt by cutting the budget 5 per cent, laying off around 300 people. In December there was another stunner: Wrright had issued a secret memo in which he advocated setting up a political action committee at NBC. "Employees who elect not to participate in a giving program should question their dedication to the company and their expectations," he'd written.
This looked like material for my next Letterman spot. After all, Dave was already making cutesy quips about Wright's mental capacities. I'd improve on his act. I'd dig up a lot of solid, hard formation on GE and spill it on the show. On top of that, I'd be cocky and funny. I'd offer Wright equal time, and challenge him to a debate for money, marbles, or chalk.
So I went to the library looking for dirt. It was all over the place. While researching a 1961 price-fixing conspiracy GE had been involved in, I found an article stating that the company had been convicted of antitrust violations in 29 of the previous 50 years. They were still doing questionable things in the '80s. I ran across articles with titles like "Defense Department Disqualifies GE From New Work," "GE Pleads Guilty to False Claims, Statements," and "Foul Play on a Mega-merger? (Inside Traders and the GE-RCA Deal)." Armed with this information, I'd square up in front of the TV cameras and take on the beast in its lair.
I talked about my GE-bashing ideas to a couple of Letterman staffers and they thought it would be okay, so I was surprised when head producer Barry Sand pleaded with me an hour before the show not to talk about GE. He said it would be inappropriate: "This isn't Meet the Press." Beyond that, he said he'd checked with the legal department and there might be dire consequences for me and members of the Letterman staff if I condemned GE in a serious way. I had trouble believing Sand, but I knew Wright could make it rough for him and his co-workers, whom I liked, so I decided to shelve my plans and do about what I'd done on my first show – mess around.
The January program was loose, a lot of fun. Letterman and I visited a Live at Five broadcast, which aired while we were on the set. I saw weatherman Al Roker, who'd previously worked in Cleveland, and got into a noisy discussion with him about the old days and great weathermen of the past. (Cleveland is a spawning ground for outstanding meteorologists of every description.) Once in a while, the camera would cut to guest Ruth Westheimer, who sat in the corner looking puzzled. Later in the segment, Letterman asked if I liked him and I replied, "Man, I don't even know you!"
Laughs came so easily that night! I felt pretty good about myself. But the next day I was embarrassed when a buddy asked, "Hey, big shot, I thought you were gonna talk about GE. What happened?" What happened was that I'd demonstrated I could get laughs by acting like "the lunatic from Cleveland." Was it possible to have a normal, interesting conversation on Late Night? The segment producer told me only celebrities could get away with it. Maybe not even celebrities. If Einstein returned from the other side with the answer to the origin of the universe and made his initial appearance on Late Night, Letterman would chide him about his baggy clothes.
Late Night would wind up a trap for me if I played along. I'd gotten indications that even Letterman, a quick-witted, perceptive guy but no intellectual, may be annoyed by the show's bright-eyed vacuousness. Once during a commercial he said to me, "Do you believe I get paid for this?" But the money's good, be gets a lot of days off, obviously likes doing comedy, and is good at it. Does anyone think he's going back to Ball State for his Ph.D. in meteorology?
Meanwhile, my life was beginning to change. A filmmaker offered me $1000 a day for a walk-on. A director wanted to dramatize some of my stories and have me act in the production. A TV producer pitched me to the Fox network as a talk show host. I told him I wasn't interested, I didn't want to waste my time in lightweight conversation with celebrities and live in a fishbowl. The producer laughed at me and went on negotiating. He set up a deal for me to go out to L.A. and do a couple of pilots for Fox. I said I still wasn't interested. He couldn't believe it. He got his friends and business associates to try to talk me into it. When I wouldn't change my mind, they couldn't believe it. Why do so many Americans think the greatest thing in the world is to be on TV, that the more people see you the better off you are?
But a little show biz doesn't represent a commitment, right? So I was going back on Late Night March 24. What would I talk about? You guessed it, GE! Was I obsessed? Well, yes and yes. Yes, I am obsessive. Yes, it's always worthwhile to focus the public's attention on outfits like GE. And yes, it's okay to bite the hand that holds out $490.
I devised a new strategy for the March 24 show. I'd begin my segment as usual, then craftily lead the conversation around to GE and explode. I wouldn't tell the producers my plan, so they couldn't stop me. It didn't work out too well. I opened with a strident pitch for my second Doubleday anthology, shouting, flapping my arms, waving off Letterman's attempt to stop me. I got some yuks, but it occurred to me that a lot of people thought I was a lunatic. Our conversation didn't flow, it ground along. I was depressed and Letterman seemed melancholy. Still, he was convulsing people with remarks like "Where'd you get those eyebrows? You look like Zero Mostel."
I was getting shakier and more frustrated by the minute. Then I remembered there was something bigger here than my ego; the world had to be saved from GE. "Stop your slide, man, dig in your heels and make your move." I mentioned that as youths Tom Brokaw, Robert Redford, and I had roamed the Pacific Northwest, rock climbing and white water rafting, then said, "Speaking of Tom, I hear he's upset about working at NBC News because there's a conflict of interest between them and GE. GE's the third largest defense contractor, you know." The crowd was silent, puzzled. Letterman shifted to a commercial.
GE and NBC got plenty of attention this spring and summer. Its subsidiary, Kidder, Peabody, & Co., was fined $25.3 million for securities violations. In late May, the Cleveland Plain Dealer broke a story concerning three southern Ohio power companies suing GE for over $1 billion for selling them a defective nuclear reactor. GE had sold reactors of the same type, all with design flaws that made them unsafe, unreliable, and costly to operate, to other utility companies around the country. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to repair them and bring them up to standard, money that rate payers ultimately supply. Amazingly, it was discovered that GE had a report, compiled by their engineers in 1975, identifying the reactors' defects. GE executives decided to sell them anyway and let a purchasers/pay for most of the repairing and upgrading.
The GE reactor story is an important and ongoing story, yet NBC national news hadn't covered it by July 31, when I made my last appearance on Late Night. That reminded me of the congressional hearings that had been held in April, concerning problems inherent in TV networks being owned by conglomerates. Wright and NBC News chief Lawrence Grossman testified that GE couldn't possibly get away with forcing the network to alter the content of its news broadcasts. Any attempt to do so, they claimed, would result in an uproar so great that it as bound to fail.
I vowed to bring the subject up on my next appearance. What if I just jumped up and down and started yelling about GE without a lead-in? What could Letterman do, not ask me back? So what; I had a decent job, a place to stay. I had to do something constructive on TV, if not for the good of humanity then just to feel at peace with myself. Get the GE monkey off my back.
Before the show I ran into Letterman. We had a chat and he told me I had star potential, but during my last appearance we'd gotten bogged down in bickering. It was okay to insult him, since Late Night resembles professional wrestling, but if I did, the crowd would be on his side since it was his show.
I said, "Okay, but I want to talk about GE."
He said, "This isn't Meet the Press."
I insisted, so he finally agreed to let me do it if I didn’t stay on the subject too long. His bottom line was, “I’ll ask the questions, you answer ‘em."
Before the show, the segment producer came up to me with a list of eight questions. I noticed that GE was number seven and smelled a rat. So I went over to Letterman and asked him to move it to number two, so we could get it in.
The show starts. First is a harried zoo-keeper from Columbus who inadvertently loses track of some snakes and a hummingbird. Then Chris Elliott does a Marion Brando imitation. Next is a Gomer Pyle-type guy, supposedly doing a remote from Pittsburgh about an Arena Football game. Then I walk in, scowling. Letterman asks me about the TV talk show offer. I tell him I turned it down. "Why?" he asks. "Because," I tell him, "I been watching you up here." Hilarity breaks loose. The first five minutes are magic. During the commercial Letterman leans down and says, "perfect."
He isn't going to ask about GE. I've got to act alone. After the break I start shouting denunciations of GE. Letterman tries to interrupt. "Shaddup," I say, "I'm doing my thing."
Letterman complains that what I'm doing is inappropriate, that I, as a guest in his house, shouldn't be sneezing in the hors d'oeuvres. "Bullshit, where's the hors d'oeuvres," I say. The bit ends.
I'd wondered what would happen if I seriously bad-mouthed GE on NBC. Now I know. David Letterman can put down their lightbulbs, but I can't criticize their nuclear reactors.
There's plenty more to come in the book, and I'll have 2 more pieces Harvey wrote to post here in the next two months.
Harvey's working with DC Comics now - the first miniseries American Splendor: Another Day was just collected and is some of his best stuff. Vol. 2 is out as individual comics, and you can find them on Amazon or at a local comic book store.
I called Harvey and let him know the book's becoming more real and also asked his permission to republish some of his stuff that the Press cut from the book on this blog. Here's a 1987 piece Harvey wrote about being interviewed by David Letterman. I didn't even try to get permission to use those interviews. It appears here courtesy of and copyright by Harvey Pekar. Print it out and put it in the appropriate place in the book, after the 1987 interview by Henry Allen of the Washington Post:
Late Night of the Soul with David Letterman
Harvey Pekar / 1987
From The Village Voice, August 25, 1987, pp. 45-46. Reprinted with permission of Harvey Pekar.
Compared to many artists I'm in good shape. I've got a civil service job in Cleveland that pays me enough to write and publish, without making compromises, a comic book called American Splendor. In April '86, Doubleday issued an anthology of my work and it received gratifying critical response. Then, last summer, an assistant producer from Late Night With David Letterman contacted me about making an appearance on the show. It turns out that Letterman's head writer is from Cleveland and had recommended me as a guest. I was scheduled for October 15 and told, "Above all, don't get too serious."
Trouble was, I'd never been on TV. I knew nothing about Letterman except that he was a renowned put-down artist, and had no idea what to expect. I figured it'd be a one-shot; I'd answer a few questions and go home. All I wanted to do was sell a few books and avoid embarrassment.
I guess I'm jaded—I live in Cleveland and I've seen it all—so I wasn't surprised when Letterman started asking me these dumb questions, like "How are things in Cleveland?" They were so silly I started giving him incredulous looks and ridiculing him, saying he was a show biz phony and complaining about the lousy money he paid ($100 for the first appearance). The audience ate it up. Here was this sour faced, sloppily dressed file clerk turning the tables on Mr. Condescending Wise Guy. Letterman, who's, off camera, a quiet, thoughtful man, held me over five minutes and publicly asked me to return.
They raised the amount I got for the next show to $490. That plus free plane rides and a hotel room for my wife and myself made doing Late Night again worthwhile. I wasn't selling out, was I? The thought bothered me, and, as my next appearance, on January 6, approached, I began to consider injecting some substance into my slapstick act. For some time, I'd been reading disturbing reports about the state of affairs at NBC, which, with the rest of RCA, had been purchased by General Electric in December '85. GE sent their man Robert Wright over to assume the NBC presidency in September '86. Wright quickly made his presence felt by cutting the budget 5 per cent, laying off around 300 people. In December there was another stunner: Wrright had issued a secret memo in which he advocated setting up a political action committee at NBC. "Employees who elect not to participate in a giving program should question their dedication to the company and their expectations," he'd written.
This looked like material for my next Letterman spot. After all, Dave was already making cutesy quips about Wright's mental capacities. I'd improve on his act. I'd dig up a lot of solid, hard formation on GE and spill it on the show. On top of that, I'd be cocky and funny. I'd offer Wright equal time, and challenge him to a debate for money, marbles, or chalk.
So I went to the library looking for dirt. It was all over the place. While researching a 1961 price-fixing conspiracy GE had been involved in, I found an article stating that the company had been convicted of antitrust violations in 29 of the previous 50 years. They were still doing questionable things in the '80s. I ran across articles with titles like "Defense Department Disqualifies GE From New Work," "GE Pleads Guilty to False Claims, Statements," and "Foul Play on a Mega-merger? (Inside Traders and the GE-RCA Deal)." Armed with this information, I'd square up in front of the TV cameras and take on the beast in its lair.
I talked about my GE-bashing ideas to a couple of Letterman staffers and they thought it would be okay, so I was surprised when head producer Barry Sand pleaded with me an hour before the show not to talk about GE. He said it would be inappropriate: "This isn't Meet the Press." Beyond that, he said he'd checked with the legal department and there might be dire consequences for me and members of the Letterman staff if I condemned GE in a serious way. I had trouble believing Sand, but I knew Wright could make it rough for him and his co-workers, whom I liked, so I decided to shelve my plans and do about what I'd done on my first show – mess around.
The January program was loose, a lot of fun. Letterman and I visited a Live at Five broadcast, which aired while we were on the set. I saw weatherman Al Roker, who'd previously worked in Cleveland, and got into a noisy discussion with him about the old days and great weathermen of the past. (Cleveland is a spawning ground for outstanding meteorologists of every description.) Once in a while, the camera would cut to guest Ruth Westheimer, who sat in the corner looking puzzled. Later in the segment, Letterman asked if I liked him and I replied, "Man, I don't even know you!"
Laughs came so easily that night! I felt pretty good about myself. But the next day I was embarrassed when a buddy asked, "Hey, big shot, I thought you were gonna talk about GE. What happened?" What happened was that I'd demonstrated I could get laughs by acting like "the lunatic from Cleveland." Was it possible to have a normal, interesting conversation on Late Night? The segment producer told me only celebrities could get away with it. Maybe not even celebrities. If Einstein returned from the other side with the answer to the origin of the universe and made his initial appearance on Late Night, Letterman would chide him about his baggy clothes.
Late Night would wind up a trap for me if I played along. I'd gotten indications that even Letterman, a quick-witted, perceptive guy but no intellectual, may be annoyed by the show's bright-eyed vacuousness. Once during a commercial he said to me, "Do you believe I get paid for this?" But the money's good, be gets a lot of days off, obviously likes doing comedy, and is good at it. Does anyone think he's going back to Ball State for his Ph.D. in meteorology?
Meanwhile, my life was beginning to change. A filmmaker offered me $1000 a day for a walk-on. A director wanted to dramatize some of my stories and have me act in the production. A TV producer pitched me to the Fox network as a talk show host. I told him I wasn't interested, I didn't want to waste my time in lightweight conversation with celebrities and live in a fishbowl. The producer laughed at me and went on negotiating. He set up a deal for me to go out to L.A. and do a couple of pilots for Fox. I said I still wasn't interested. He couldn't believe it. He got his friends and business associates to try to talk me into it. When I wouldn't change my mind, they couldn't believe it. Why do so many Americans think the greatest thing in the world is to be on TV, that the more people see you the better off you are?
But a little show biz doesn't represent a commitment, right? So I was going back on Late Night March 24. What would I talk about? You guessed it, GE! Was I obsessed? Well, yes and yes. Yes, I am obsessive. Yes, it's always worthwhile to focus the public's attention on outfits like GE. And yes, it's okay to bite the hand that holds out $490.
I devised a new strategy for the March 24 show. I'd begin my segment as usual, then craftily lead the conversation around to GE and explode. I wouldn't tell the producers my plan, so they couldn't stop me. It didn't work out too well. I opened with a strident pitch for my second Doubleday anthology, shouting, flapping my arms, waving off Letterman's attempt to stop me. I got some yuks, but it occurred to me that a lot of people thought I was a lunatic. Our conversation didn't flow, it ground along. I was depressed and Letterman seemed melancholy. Still, he was convulsing people with remarks like "Where'd you get those eyebrows? You look like Zero Mostel."
I was getting shakier and more frustrated by the minute. Then I remembered there was something bigger here than my ego; the world had to be saved from GE. "Stop your slide, man, dig in your heels and make your move." I mentioned that as youths Tom Brokaw, Robert Redford, and I had roamed the Pacific Northwest, rock climbing and white water rafting, then said, "Speaking of Tom, I hear he's upset about working at NBC News because there's a conflict of interest between them and GE. GE's the third largest defense contractor, you know." The crowd was silent, puzzled. Letterman shifted to a commercial.
GE and NBC got plenty of attention this spring and summer. Its subsidiary, Kidder, Peabody, & Co., was fined $25.3 million for securities violations. In late May, the Cleveland Plain Dealer broke a story concerning three southern Ohio power companies suing GE for over $1 billion for selling them a defective nuclear reactor. GE had sold reactors of the same type, all with design flaws that made them unsafe, unreliable, and costly to operate, to other utility companies around the country. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to repair them and bring them up to standard, money that rate payers ultimately supply. Amazingly, it was discovered that GE had a report, compiled by their engineers in 1975, identifying the reactors' defects. GE executives decided to sell them anyway and let a purchasers/pay for most of the repairing and upgrading.
The GE reactor story is an important and ongoing story, yet NBC national news hadn't covered it by July 31, when I made my last appearance on Late Night. That reminded me of the congressional hearings that had been held in April, concerning problems inherent in TV networks being owned by conglomerates. Wright and NBC News chief Lawrence Grossman testified that GE couldn't possibly get away with forcing the network to alter the content of its news broadcasts. Any attempt to do so, they claimed, would result in an uproar so great that it as bound to fail.
I vowed to bring the subject up on my next appearance. What if I just jumped up and down and started yelling about GE without a lead-in? What could Letterman do, not ask me back? So what; I had a decent job, a place to stay. I had to do something constructive on TV, if not for the good of humanity then just to feel at peace with myself. Get the GE monkey off my back.
Before the show I ran into Letterman. We had a chat and he told me I had star potential, but during my last appearance we'd gotten bogged down in bickering. It was okay to insult him, since Late Night resembles professional wrestling, but if I did, the crowd would be on his side since it was his show.
I said, "Okay, but I want to talk about GE."
He said, "This isn't Meet the Press."
I insisted, so he finally agreed to let me do it if I didn’t stay on the subject too long. His bottom line was, “I’ll ask the questions, you answer ‘em."
Before the show, the segment producer came up to me with a list of eight questions. I noticed that GE was number seven and smelled a rat. So I went over to Letterman and asked him to move it to number two, so we could get it in.
The show starts. First is a harried zoo-keeper from Columbus who inadvertently loses track of some snakes and a hummingbird. Then Chris Elliott does a Marion Brando imitation. Next is a Gomer Pyle-type guy, supposedly doing a remote from Pittsburgh about an Arena Football game. Then I walk in, scowling. Letterman asks me about the TV talk show offer. I tell him I turned it down. "Why?" he asks. "Because," I tell him, "I been watching you up here." Hilarity breaks loose. The first five minutes are magic. During the commercial Letterman leans down and says, "perfect."
He isn't going to ask about GE. I've got to act alone. After the break I start shouting denunciations of GE. Letterman tries to interrupt. "Shaddup," I say, "I'm doing my thing."
Letterman complains that what I'm doing is inappropriate, that I, as a guest in his house, shouldn't be sneezing in the hors d'oeuvres. "Bullshit, where's the hors d'oeuvres," I say. The bit ends.
I'd wondered what would happen if I seriously bad-mouthed GE on NBC. Now I know. David Letterman can put down their lightbulbs, but I can't criticize their nuclear reactors.
There's plenty more to come in the book, and I'll have 2 more pieces Harvey wrote to post here in the next two months.
Saturday, February 03, 2024
That darn Big Nate, Doonesbury, and Michael Ramirez
An end to the age-old old-age shunning? [Big Nate letter]
Pamela Ehrenberg, Washington
Washington Post February 3 2024: A15
Pamela Ehrenberg, Washington
Kudos to Lincoln Peirce for the recent "Big Nate" series in which Nate and his grandparents toured a senior living facility. That was the first time I've seen this topic addressed in almost 50 years of reading what used to be called the funnies.
Perhaps this, together with the Dec. 24 Business article "Aging in America," about living options for those over 85, will usher in a new beginning for how our society views this life chapter: using love, openness and humor to address collectively the opportunities and challenges associated with elder care, rather than our current model of each family figuring things out as best as we can on our own (with most then fearing we've done it "wrong" in some way). "Big Nate" and The Post helped multiple generations feel seen in this topic.
He just can't wait to get on the road again [ Michael Ramirez letter] Susan Clark, and John Spitzak
Washington Post February 3 2024: A15
Susan Clark, and John Spitzak
Washington Post February 3 2024: A15
In his Jan. 20 editorial cartoon, Michael Ramirez forgot to include former president Donald Trump as the driver of the truck. Trump, as The Post has noted, increased the debt by nearly $7.8 trillion, one of the largest percentage increases in federal debt in U.S. history.
Susan Clark, Annandale
Michael Ramirez should be reminded that political cartoons are funny only when they contain a kernel of truth. In his Jan. 20 editorial cartoon, he depicted President Biden kicking a can in the path of a (admittedly very well-rendered) truck labeled "National Debt." I would expect Ramirez to be aware that it is Congress that controls the budget and that is "kicking the can," and that the bulk of the debt is something Biden inherited (in particular, from his immediate predecessor).
It is an unwritten understanding that those with the privilege of making their living through political art should contribute to the conversation (with a right-wing slant if they desire) but not peddle fantasies. If Ramirez cannot agree to this understanding, perhaps he should stick to just drawing trucks.
John Spitzak, Arlington
No, *you're* the nice guy [Doonesbury letter] Vinod K. Jain, Ashburn
Washington Post February 3 2024: A15
Vinod K. Jain, Ashburn
Washington Post February 3 2024: A15
I have enjoyed the "Doonesbury" comic strip for a long time. The strip's creator, Garry Trudeau, has a knack for highlighting the quirks of everyday social and political life in the United States. The Jan. 21 strip was particularly telling.
The strip depicted a caller to a radio show, perhaps former president Donald Trump, who attributed his own unacceptable behavior to others, which psychiatrists call "projection." Trudeau illustrated Trump's actions with several examples, such as lying and being a sexual abuser and a fraudster — allegations that Trump leveled against others. This reminded me of an incident in my own life decades ago when I complimented a neighbor with "You are a really nice guy." He responded to the compliment with a saying in Persian, which translated to something like "I am but a mirror; you are seeing yourself in me." That's what projection is all about. Some people attribute to others what is true of themselves.
Trump's utterances accuse others of behaviors that effectively mirror his own. For example, his baseless claims of a deep state show that he is projecting his own behaviors on others. As the New Republic aptly reported in October 2020, "The Real Deep State Is Trump." Such a portrayal in "Doonesbury" is not merely satire but a poignant reflection of reality.
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