When I was a kid, Sunday mornings before you had to get ready for church were filled with the Funny Pages.

The Regina Leader-Post, my newspaper of record at the time, actually didn’t publish a Sunday paper. But the Saturday edition came with a thick insert of full color cartoons that my brother and I stashed unread until the next morning.

We’d get up and turn on the radio, where a couple of the local DJ’s would giggle and snicker and read the comics to you. They had theme songs for each section and described every panel in exquisite detail, in case you didn’t have the comic section or you might have missed the hidden visual joke in the bottom right hand corner.

The show filled up an entire hour with nothing but two guys cackling over the adventures of “Pogo”, “Blondie”, “Superman” and whoever else graced the hand drawn pages of newspapers back then. It was an hour that allowed harried parents to sleep in while inventing what may have been the first multi-media entertainment format.

And I just realized that in describing this I’ve handed CanWest or some other low-rent Canadian broadcaster another hour of inexpensive programming they won’t have to pay writers to create…

…although they’ll probably need to find a way to own, synergize and vertically integrate all the cartoons first…

…and not just in their executive offices…Ba-Dump-Bump!

Anyway.

What was great about the combination of that radio show and those funny pages was the way they attracted you to characters and stories you might otherwise have never allowed yourself (or been allowed) to be exposed to and also helped you to appreciate them.

Walt Kelly’s “Pogo”, for example, was not a comic strip for kids. But it lead off the Leader Post comic pages (and therefore the show) and it was obvious by how much fun they had with the stories that the DJ’s liked it a lot. This was political and social satire of the first order and far above my head. But the sense you got was that this was something other people really enjoyed and maybe you should bookmark it for future reference.

Later in life, when I was able to decipher who the Pogo characters really were and what their “swamp talk” meant, I understood why J. Edgar Hoover had gone so far as to have FBI cryptographers search for “hidden messages” in the content.

But additionally crammed into those brightly colored pages were more story variety and differing styles of humor than can be found in any night of prime time television programming.

There was the whimsy of the Disney strips and the Wisdom of “Peanuts”. There was the classy family fun of “Hi and Lois” and slapstick of “Dennis the Menace”. And there were also serial adventures set in the worlds of fantasy and pulp like “Superman” and “Red Ryder”.

There were also a couple of strips the guys on the radio skipped, such as Milt Caniff’s “Terry and the Pirates” probably because it would have taken an entire hour just to get through the dark plots, complex visuals and lengthy dialogue.

As a trivia note, at the time I was exposed to them, many of those strips were inked by Sonny Grosso, a budding New York cartoonist who became the French Connection Cop, then technical advisor on “The Godfather” and later producer of several TV series.

An avid consumer of these strips also couldn’t help noticing over time that the same joke you laughed at one week in “Beetle Bailey” might pop up again later in “Mutt ‘n Jeff”. But each had a completely different approach to the material, a point of view skewed by its inner reality and an alterantive visual style in which to sell the punch line.

In a way, those competing strips were a triumph of style over content, less concerned with what they were saying than how they said it and always aware that they had to engage and excite you in the process.

The color comic sections have either disappeared from today’s newspapers or remain only as a shadow of their former selves. Maybe they’re not cost effective anymore. Maybe the level of creative talent they require has moved to greener pastures.

But what we’ve lost is not just the fleeting enjoyment they offered, but the easy exposure to a story or visual style one audience or another hasn’t previously embraced.

That social aspect of Cartooning is among the many elements of the craft explored in detail by Robert Mankoff, cartoonist, cartoon editor of the New Yorker and creator of The Cartoon Bank in a documentary available online at Big Think and excerpted below.

It’s a wonderful exploration of what’s funny and why and almost as much fun as reading (or listening to) the funny pages themselves.

Enjoy your Sunday.

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“There's a hole in daddy's arm where all the money goes,
Jesus Christ died for nothin' I suppose.
Little pitchers have big ears,
Don't stop to count the years,
Sweet songs never last too long on broken radios…”

                      -- John Prine (“The Ballad of Sam Stone”)

On Wednesday, I was invited to attend a conference ostensibly billed as my opportunity to learn about and comment upon the newly established and still working out the wrinkles Canada Media Fund, the Federal Government’s new program to assist in the finance of television programming and projects designed to take advantage of the burgeoning “New Media” frontiers.

There were about 300 of us. Independent Producers. Documentary Filmmakers. Creative Guilds. Broadcasters. And pioneers in the realms of interactive entertainment, game design, online content and other enterprises trying to bring Canadian innovation and creation to the Internet.

It was a very genteel affair. There were curried soups, Italian sandwiches, tofu nibblies for the Vegetarians in the crowd and fancy pastries. There were screens for Powerpoint presentations, whiteboards for scrawling and a mass of microphones to make sure every question and comment was recorded.

At the centre of the room was a circular table with microphones where volunteers from each of the gathered groups could be specifically questioned on various topics by the facilitators and representatives of the new Canadian Media Fund.

These were mostly the same people who have administered the Canadian Television Fund for many years and are now charged with preparing the industry for the new rules and regulations that will govern what drama, comedy, documentaries and children’s programming gets made in this country.

The whole thing was a well orchestrated bureaucrat’s fantasy. And in true “The Bureaucrats are running things” fashion, the first thing that those of us already tech savvy learned was – the room had no internet access.

No tweeting colleagues across the room. No googling additional information on anything discussed. No fact checking. No showing somebody your Youtube video. No comparing what you were being told today with emails on your home computer from yesterday when the nice lady at the CMF had assured you they were really “on your side”.

Speaking one on one, they’re always “on your side”, aren’t they? That’s how bureaucracy works. You think you’re being taken into confidence, when you are simply being taken.

Somewhere around the 7th Century BC, Sun Tsu, author of “The Art of War” the most important book ever written about dealing with crisis and conflict and those who would govern others warned, “When bureaucrats prosper, the people are harmed”.

And for the next few hours we were duly harmed. Disabused of any notion that this new fund will actually finance any innovative activity in new media. Made to realize that there will be less money in this diluted pot of public money for actual production of television. Instructed to give up any hope for a turn around in the industry.

Oh, they were gentle with us, repeating the mantra that nobody was going to get everything they wanted, slathering us with lubricants so it wouldn’t hurt as much when the penny finally dropped and what was being “recommended”, “seriously considered” or “mandated by the Heritage Department” was finally revealed and we all knew that the creative community and Canadian taxpayer were once again going to be royally boned in order to feed the insatiable hunger for free money of our nation’s broadcasters. 

“But the morphine eased the pain,
And the grass grew round his brain,
And gave him all the confidence he lacked,
With a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back…”

While the chipper CMF people kept insisting that no final decisions have been made, a simple read of the detailed handouts made it clear that creating and supporting even more revenue streams for the broadcast networks was a fait accompli.

Not only do our broadcasters already get a major portion of their program financing from the Canadian Taxpayer, not to mention such handsome regulatory gifts as simultaneous transmission, increasing commercial minutes, genre protected specialty channels, Local programming funds to pay for the one hour of news they do each day and the incessant consideration of “carriage fees” --- under the new CMF they’re going to get even more.

Broadcasters will now be able to access public money to produce their own “in house” programming. They’ll receive funds to set up and operate the online streaming of the programs they produce. And unless I’m completely misinterpreting the lines we were carefully coached to read between, the shows they produce with taxpayer money won’t even have to have many Canadians in them.

The fund created by Parliament to “tell Canadian stories” will instead finance stories written by writers who aren’t Canadian and star actors who live in Hollywood. The next time a picture like the one below appears in the newspapers, it’s quite likely the only actual Canadian content will be the Heritage Minister.

Keeping Canadian television series that are funded with public money 100% Canadian was the first item on a top ten wish list I was given by the Writers Guild of Canada. Number two on that list was a request that CMF regulations be relaxed so Canadian writers can write science fiction stories that “take place in a generic or fantasy setting that is not identifiably foreign”.

That should give you some idea of how much control bureaucrats in Ottawa now have over what gets written in this country.

Please, sir – permission to write my own ideas? I mean, it may not take place in Toronto, but it’s a really good story…

Nope. Not if you want Public money.

However, if your program schedule is wall-to-wall with American Science Fiction, American cops, American soldiers fighting in Iraq, American reality Shows and American celebrity gossip, you can have almost as much Canadian tax money as you want. With these new “in-house” regulations, CTV, CBC and CanWest are well on their way to getting tax credits for just telling you what the weather is.

And when they stream that weathercast online, you’ll pay for it some more.

And when they send it to your iPhone, you’ll pay twice. Once for the stream and once for the air time you used. And likely both to the same conglomerate that owns the TV channel and your cell phone company and still seems to need government welfare.

And while the Canadian public is constantly told by this Federal government and our business leaders that we need innovation and imagination to get our country to the forefront of the high tech future, the insatiable need of our broadcasters to have control of the vast majority of the new media funds makes that an impossibility.

Like a junkie who needs ever larger doses of Heroin to get high and lets his kids starve to get his fix, our broadcasters have successfully lobbied the Heritage Department and the Canadian Media Fund to make sure almost none of these public funds go to anyone actually trying to innovate any form of new media.

Our broadcasters’ addiction and the apparent willingness of our Government to feed it is literally destroying any chance that we’ll ever be a player in any high tech future.

This country already lags much of the world in almost every aspect of new media production and delivery. More money is made by 16 year old kids designing iPhone Apps in other parts of the world in one day than is earned by our new media creators in an entire year.

Without an intervention, where somebody in government has the courage to finally tell our broadcasters to start putting their enormous profits back into their own research and development and their own business instead of spending it to buy more companies they can unsuccessfully synergize and vertically integrate with, Canada will soon be so far behind the rest of the world in this department that we’ll never catch up.

It was patently obvious to everybody in that room that our media fund bureaucrats had been doing what the broadcasters have demanded for so long that they were completely incapable of conceiving how money from the fund could be used for projects that don’t need a broadcaster in the first place.

Mobile Apps, Gaming, Interactive Content, IPTV all had no handholds in the new regulations their developers could even grab onto. And why should that be surprising! The people who run the CMF still don’t get why “The Trailer Park Boys”was a success, insisted they didn’t want to “de-stabilize” an Independent Production community that went flying off the rails years ago and didn’t laugh out loud when somebody making documentaries insisted their work shouldn’t be judged by audience ratings but by how much they had healed the world.

“And the gold rolled through his veins
Like a thousand railroad trains,
And eased his mind in the hours that he chose,
While the kids ran around wearin' other peoples' clothes...”

Over coffee later, I met people from the new media tribe who could have been my kids or my grand kids, as boggled as the clutch of screenwriters my age were as to why a fund established to foster creativity had so little actual room for it (or them) and yet had all the money in the world to pour into broadcaster coffers.

Maybe it’s too soon to say what I’m about to say. Maybe I’m tired and I’ve just had too many years of taking the rap for bad Canadian shows when I know most of the good ones never even got the chance to be on the air.

But I know that while I was in that meeting, other meetings were being held across town as CanWest assured its staff that they haven’t really gone bankrupt and they’ll all be back bringing more American entertainment into Canadian homes real soon.

So maybe I gotta say it…

If you’re under 30 and want a career in television or new media. Leave now.

I don’t know where you should go. I don’t know if your best destination is LA or Australia or London or Hong Kong. But leave now. And once you get where you think you can make a go of it, write James Moore, our Heritage Minister, and let him know that his country will have to do without your innovation and your imagination. Tell him you wanted to stay, but these junkies were stealing all your stuff and even taking the food off your shelf in the fridge, although they had more than enough of their own.

Tell him you’ll come back if he can get the broadcasters off the public teat, get them to clean up their act and contribute to society and the business the way the rest of us do, instead of being the self-centred pigs that they are, squeezing producer budgets so some shows aren’t even paying people minimum wage or they’re working for credits.

If you’re over 30…

Maybe the best thing is to go to your nearest Tim Horton’s and see if you can get on the night shift. There might be a chance you can get some writing in around 4:00 a.m. when the rubbies are all snoozing and the bagels the Bureaucrats will be buying to go with their morning coffee are still in the oven.

I know it’ll take you longer writing that script if you’re working at Tim’s. But at least you’ll have one ready once the Bureaucrats realize that if the broadcasters are getting all the money then nobody probably needs them to do any fund managing anymore.

The creatives in this country and the taxpayers are the ones suffering now. But you people from the CMF who spent the day annoying, patronizing and marginalizing us will be next. Because when Daddy needs to fill that hole in his arm, everybody and everything else will sooner or later disappear.

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Last week, it was David Letterman admitting to multiple “affairs” with members of his staff, including some of his female writers.

This week, Jimmy Kimmel revealed he was sleeping with one of his writers.

Simultaneously, the gossip pages were speculating that “Mad Men” creator Matt Weiner had decided to stop sleeping with one of his writers and she had subsequently left the show.

Now, if one wanted to take this series of events less seriously, you could wonder:

a) Wow, TV writers must really be hot stuff, huh?

b) Have none of these guys heard that old Hollywood Joke -- “Didja hear about the Polish Actress? She slept with the writer!”

c) Is this “people who work together sometimes sleep together” somehow news to anybody?

Look, I’m not condoning the practice of the rich and powerful having sex with people who work for them. And certainly not if they abuse their positions of privilege to seduce people who feel pressured to satisfy their boss’s desires.

But the way the mainstream media has jumped all over this issue and begun rooting out new versions of the story makes me think that before we’re through they’ll be outraged upon learning that Lucy was sleeping with Desi…

John Doyle of the Globe and Mail was among many who used the Letterman story to write an impassioned piece defending the honor of the ladies of our industry. You can find it here. And I gotta say that I don’t disagree with many of the sentiments Mr. Doyle shares in his column.

And as much as Mr. Doyle and I have disagreed on other issues in the past, the one thing I sense is that he is a Gentleman of the old school and chivalrous to a fault. However, when he and others depict my show business workplace as one where the powerful endlessly feed on “the needy and vulnerable”, I feel an obligation to point out that’s there are such things in the world as Free Will and personal morality.

We all draw our own lines in the sand.

There are some things each of us won’t do under any circumstances. What I’m okay with and what you find acceptable may be completely different. There’s no harm done to either of us unless one coerces the other into moving or crossing their line.

My lines are fairly clear. I don’t sleep with anybody I’m working with. Never have. Fairly certain I never will. Down the road a little later, sure. When we’re punching the same time clock – not gonna happen.

In my view it just complicates things for everybody involved, making all of us tiptoe around things that may need to be dealt with head on, both those in the relationship and everybody else we’re working alongside.

In my 35 plus years in show business, I’ve been hit on by male and female producers, casting directors, agents, directors, lead actors and actresses and various members of the crew. The first time I was officially saddled with an Executive Producer credit, I attended a casting session with an elderly director where not one but two of the beautiful ladies auditioning included the scene Sharon Stone is most famous for as part of their presentation.

After the second actress left the room, the director smiled and said, “It’s nice to feel wanted, isn’t it?”. My wife made a far more pragmatic observation, “You poor thing! From now on you’ll never know if they really like you or they just want a job!”

And for most of us, that’s the reality of contemporary show business. The opportunities are there. Some people take advantage. Some use sex to climb the ladder of success. Sometimes some of us are left to wonder, “Did I just get fucked or did I just get fucked?”

Maybe I’m only speaking from my own experience, but most of the women I know in this business have their heads screwed on pretty straight. There aren’t a lot of Damsels in Distress. And if somebody is making them feel “icky”, both the law and the majority of people in their workplace are willing to take their side.

On two occasions, I’ve fired men who worked for me after they refused to discontinue their unwanted advances on women who worked for the company. And sadly, on a couple of others, I’ve lost valued members of my crew because they chose to work for somebody who was less of a heel.

Free will and personal morality.

Yes, I’ve taken angry phone calls from my own bosses when I wouldn’t give them the phone number of an actress who was working for us at 2:00 a.m. or give them her hotel room number so he could “send flowers”.

And I’ve also heard that catch in the voice of an actress when I’ve called late at night because my assistant has gone home and there’s just nobody else around to let her know her call time has changed.

We all know some men in the business try to take advantage.  But it goes the other way too.

One of the worst tongue lashings I ever got was from a female Producer after letting her know her personal “masseuse” was not going on the payroll. Another tried to get me fired upon hearing that the stunningly handsome young man she’d met at the gym was not going to be one of our stunt men.

This depiction of film sets as places where slimy producers give shrinking violets no choice but to surrender their innocence wrongly discredits us all. Somehow the media just don’t want to accept that we’re actual adults and capable of making the tough decisions adults sometimes have to make.

It also doesn’t take into account the nature of most production environments. People work a 12 – 18 hour day with regularity. Sometimes that goes on for months. The people you work with become the only people you see, the only people you interact with and the only ones with whom you share your feelings. That and the pressure of the machine pushes people closer. Sometimes it leads to happy marriages. Sometimes it leads to relationships that never would’ve (or should have) happened under any other circumstances.

There used to be this old Hollywood joke…

Q: Have you ever cheated on your wife?

A: Does Location count?

For me that perfectly captures the reality of production. There’s no other outlet. There’s no escape. Shit happens.

And precious little of it is without full consent from all the parties involved.

I remember a very respectable actress collapsing on the couch in my office after a particularly stressful week had led to one hell of a Friday night party I had missed. “How was the party?” I asked. “Somebody should’ve bought more condoms.” was her tired reply.

The other thing I want to say about all this is that I’m fairly certain that what was going on on “Late Night” and those other shows was fairly well known to most of the people involved and that the vast majority of the men and women working on those shows were not unlike me and had lines in the sand about not sleeping with those they worked for or with.

If Mr. Letterman’s activities or those of Mr. Kimmel or Mr. Weiner had been adversely affecting the show, the interactions of the rest of the staff or were creating a “Toxic” workplace, somebody would have brought it to their attention.

And that wouldn’t have taken extraordinary courage or selflessness. It’s simply the mark of professional.

People who are good at what they do and also have a certain pride of career or character know they’ll get another job. They also know that life’s too short for more than the normal load of bullshit. And they know that they either have to change the corporate culture or leave before any of the stain gets on them.

David Letterman wouldn’t hear any of that from his boss Leslie Moonves, who had a very open affair with one of his employees before leaving his wife for her, and he wouldn’t hear it from Sumner Redstone, who runs the whole damn conglomerate, for identical reasons. But he would have heard it from any number of people he depended on or was closer to than the women who shared his bed.

That would suggest to me that nobody was really being hurt – unless they’d allowed themselves to move their own lines in the sand.

What is news to me, however, is that this apparently doesn’t go on in newspaper offices, around morning talk shows, inside car dealerships, at real estate offices, or banks or hospitals.

Because, take it from me – it is. And as long as the people involved are okay with it, I’m sure the rest of us can get on with our lives.

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