Authored 20-plus books, many of them about legendary Hollywood film directors ✔️

Wrote and produced for A&E’s Biography series, including episodes on John Belushi, Stan Lee and Darryl Zanuck ✔️

Created When Welles Collide, the sequel to Orson Welles’ radio hoax, Invasion From Mars. The show featured a cast from Star Trek and ran annually on NPR for years ✔️

Co-authored a play about the inception of the Hollywood Blacklist that had its world premiere at L.A. Theatre Works and sold to Warner Bros. ✔️

Worked as a journalist, a radio performer and college teacher ✔️

More than that. A Lot more ✔️✔️

And coming Wednesday, in what could be the crowning achievement of Segaloff’s long career (or will at least be a very pleasant interlude on a Wednesday morning), he has agreed to be the featured guest on my next Substack live chat!

I’ve never met Nat in person, but as someone who’s also written a good deal for and about Hollywood, I’ve run across his name a dozen times. When I met someone recently who told me they were friends, I quickly recognized he’d be right for what I’m trying to do here and asked her to make the introduction. Since then, he and I have exchanged emails, texts and a phone call, but I’m looking forward to getting to know him a lot better this week.

Please join us.

Here’s the deal: Segaloff and I will talk about his career, the people he’s profiled, what he’s learned and more for about an hour, starting at 11 a.m. PDT Wednesday. (That would be 2 p.m. in the East, for the math-challenged.) If you join us live — a link will be provided through this Substack — you can add comments or questions, and we’ll try to address them all.

If you can’t make the livestream, the conversation will be posted for you to check out later. Again and again, if you like, but without the live interaction.

Tune in and subscribe if you’re interested in arts and culture, media and entertainment, or meeting good people. You can ignore all those annoying “upgrade to become a paid subscriber” buttons and get it all for free if you so choose.

But you won’t get to vote for Nat Segaloff for governor of California, because, sorry, he’s not running.

That’s a good conversation-starter in California, where citizens today are deciding which candidates they least want anywhere near a seat of governmental power.

In terms of dislikability, there are a lot of worthy candidates, which may be why so many eligible voters in our nation’s most populous state have been hanging onto their ballots for weeks, still unsure whether and for whom to cast their votes.

In most cases, it’s not an easy choice.

In Los Angeles, for instance, the overwhelming majority of voters are Democrats, and they know who they don’t like for mayor: Spencer Pratt, the reality TV villain (and Donald Trump’s choice) with no experience in government or, for that matter, any meaningful area of employment.

His biggest claim to fame, other than years spent ruining scripted friendships on MTV’s The Hills, is that his home was destroyed in last year’s Palisades Fire, briefly making him a sympathetic public figure.

At least until it came to light that he and his MTV wife, Heidi Montag, weren’t spending all their time in a trailer near the burn site, as he claimed. They were also spending it at the luxurious Hotel Bel-Air. (This is the same Pratt who admittedly burned through millions on rare crystals and a $300,000 ammunition stockpile while preparing for the Mayan apocalypse.)

And here’s the funny part — people are voting for him.

For those who haven’t been paying close attention, California has what’s commonly called a “jungle primary,” in which the top two vote-getters advance to November regardless of party. Apparently deciding that wasn’t confusing enough, Los Angeles and some other cities skip the runoff if a candidate wins more than half the vote.

That’s not likely to happen this time around. The current mayor, Karen Bass, is running for reelection after a first term that produced plenty of effort, a few obvious victories, and several big mistakes.

Bass will probably make the runoff against either Pratt or Nithya Raman, a city councilmember whom the local Democratic Socialists have declined to endorse — even though she’s a member of the organization.

Besides those three, there are 10 other mayoral candidates running, which sounds like a lot until you look at the race for governor, which has 61 candidates — yes, 61 — each of whom somehow managed to get on the ballot.

Almost no one has heard of most of these people, although a handful have serious political credentials. Xavier Becerra, for example, may be the most qualified candidate in the field, which isn’t necessarily an advantage these days.

The rest of the field includes such notables as —

• Barack D. Obama Shaw, a Bay Area music teacher who changed his name in 2013 and has probably generated more attention than most of the actual candidates;

• Frederic Schultz, who proposes expanding the California State Guard from 900 members to 2 million and promises to provide citizens free gasoline and $10,000 homes;

• LivingForGod AndCountry DeMott, who wants government to be faith-driven;

• Max Fomin, whose candidate statement says he wants to “suffocate homelessness, assassinate unemployment, nuke crime, house the unhoused, prosecute corruption, generate $”;

• And one candidate I won’t name, who believes Israel was behind 9/11, the creation of Hamas, and the murder of Charlie Kirk (with a bomb, no less).

Who knows why these people are running. Maybe there’s still time for someone’s house to burn down so he’ll pick up some last-minute momentum.

The top candidates are much better funded than these fringe contenders; some have even worked hard for California. But except for the three who have polled highest, none is any more likely to make the November ballot than LivingForGod DeMott.

Becerra, a former congressman, attorney general and Biden cabinet secretary, is the establishment favorite. His strongest rival is Tom Steyer, a hedge-fund billionaire who has spent nearly $200 million attacking Becerra’s perceived ties to special interests.

There’s also Republican Steve Hilton, a former Briton whose endorsement from Trump could possibly get him into the runoff, but in California will ultimately sink his campaign.

The good news is that most of these candidates won’t be governing California. The bad news is that some of them might.

But my generation survived a tanking economy too. And I’m here to show that one man, if he works with fierce commitment to achieve his goals and is willing to make enormous sacrifices, can actually realize those dreams.

Unfortunately, I’m not that man.

The U.S. job market was ridiculously tight when I graduated. The oil crisis — yes, we had one then too — had ushered in an era of stagflation, something economists worldwide thought was practically impossible.

Unemployment hit a 30-year high of 9 percent the month I finished school.

It was also the Watergate era when it seemed every other undergrad was switching majors to journalism. My talented friends found jobs, mostly covering sewer boards and utility commissions in small Florida towns.

Within a couple of years they had worked their way up to bigger, better papers, cooler beats, columns and editorships.

If I could’ve skipped the years of grunt work, that career path would’ve greatly appealed to me. But I had saved up a couple of grand from leftover bar mitzvah gifts and ice cream soda jerk wages. Instead of sending out résumés, I decided to try freelance magazine writing for a while.

First, though, I needed more life experience. So I went on vacation.

When I returned to Gainesville, where I’d been going to school and working at the Alligator, the student-run daily covering the University of Florida, several of my friends were unexpectedly preparing to move south.

A rough-edged shrimp boat captain in the Florida Keys had decided to start a weekly newspaper and had driven 450 miles north to recruit a four-person staff from the Alligator newsroom.

I’d already been talking with two of them about starting a magazine after graduation. Our enthusiasm for that idea had waned, but now there was this new adventure, and they invited me along.

A week later we were sharing a house in Marathon, setting up production equipment and learning the Keys.

The first big story we came upon was Mel Fisher. For years, Fisher and his seafaring family had searched for the Nuestra Señora de Atocha, a Spanish treasure galleon believed to have sunk near Key West in a 1622 hurricane carrying silver, gold, emeralds and priceless artifacts from Spain’s American colonies.

In good times and bad, Fisher always repeated the same mantra: “Today’s the day.” That’s a strong core belief I recommend to you job-seekers. Any day might be the day.

After all, we’re all searching for our own kind of treasure, aren’t we?

Fisher’s crews had already been recovering silver bars, gold chains and emeralds from the seabed for years, but in July, 1975 his oldest son and closest collaborator, Dirk, discovered nine bronze cannons weighing a ton and a half each, bearing serial numbers and foundry marks identifiable from Atocha records.

They had finally confirmed the wreck site. The search intensified.

Early on July 20, I headed out to Key West with Acey Harper, our art director, to do a feature on Fisher and Treasure Salvors, Inc. We had barely crossed the Seven-Mile Bridge when we heard on the radio that Dirk Fisher, his wife and another crew member had drowned when their boat capsized overnight.

After years of Mel Fisher pulling treasure from the sea floor, the ocean had taken something back.

We got to Key West just as the recovery boat came in. I photographed Mel sobbing inside the cabin while crewmen carried the three covered bodies onto the pier.

We wired that photo and one of Acey’s to UPI, and they ran in newspapers around the country.

For weeks afterward, our paper stayed on the story. One piece we ran about the State of Florida fighting with Fisher over the treasure’s exact value ran with the headline, “Scrutiny on the Bounty.”

Not only did we become adept at covering the Keys, we also learned how to produce a newspaper from scratch — design pages, set type, haul layouts to the printer, even distribute copies all over Marathon.

We did pretty much everything but sell ads.

Unfortunately, the shrimper-in-charge wasn’t doing much of that either, which is why after four issues, he summoned us to his office down the street, paid us off and told us to get lost.

Wait, did I say “us”? Actually, he paid my friends, but in all this life-changing excitement, I had neglected to negotiate an actual employment agreement. He reminded me of this not with words, but by physically shoving me aside after handing my friends their cash.

And so I learned the final lesson I’d like to pass along to today’s graduates: Find work you love so much you’d gladly do it for free, but don’t let the boss know that until after you’ve agreed on the paycheck.

As for the rest of you, those who long ago secured gainful employment can help me continue mining these columns from the depths by upgrading your subscriptions below.

Somebody’s gotta keep this operation afloat.

What if you were from a different country and had only been living in the U.S. for 15-20 years?

I ask because I had an odd session with a rheumatologist last week. I hadn’t done any research about him other than to get a reference from my GP, so I didn’t know his age or national origin. For that matter, I didn’t even clearly understand what a rheumatologist was, but that’s another matter.

Upon talking with him for a few minutes, I guessed he was in his mid-to-late 30s and originally from eastern Europe.

He took some time to get to know me and asked about my career. Of the things I mentioned, he was most interested to hear about the magazine profiles I’d written and immediately asked which celebrity was my biggest interview.

Well, I said, the biggest in terms of size would have to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, making a joke that didn’t land. Of course, the doctor must’ve still been in the crib during the Lakers’ showtime era, and probably a crib far away from Los Angeles.

I thought some more and settled on Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees, who happened to be riding the hottest musical streak on earth with Saturday Night Fever at the time I interviewed him.

No reaction.

I could accept that. I came to terms long ago with the fact that pro athletes and pop stars were all getting to be younger than I was. So were doctors.

To get past the awkwardness, I started talking about the music of my era, how I was at first prejudiced against the Bee Gees’ album because it seemed to be part of a disco craze that was replacing the greatest music of the last 100 years, the music of my youth.

“What music did you like,” he asked, perking up. “Dean Martin?”

I honestly wasn’t sure I’d heard him right and made him repeat it. Yep, Dino. That’s who he thought of when guessing my musical taste.

Now, to be clear, I liked Dean Martin okay. He seemed to be a cool, easy-going guy, who didn’t take himself or anything else too seriously. But his music? I can only remember one song he ever did — “Everybody Loves Somebody,” which was written years before I was born and became his theme song for a TV variety show geared to my parents’ generation.

I seriously can’t think of anyone who would say Dean Martin was the guy who got their juices flowing in their teens and 20s — certainly not anyone under 95. (And if I were that old, I’d pick Sinatra.)

I told the doctor no, I was more of a Beatles and Stones kind of guy. He nodded and said he knew about the Beatles. Didn’t mention the Stones one way or another, but he may have thought I was referring to my kidneys, because I noticed him checking my chart.

We finished up the appointment with no more surprises, but when I got home, I googled him and learned where he’d spent his early years, and it wasn’t another planet as I’d come to suspect, but it was pretty damn close:

Siberia.

Now, far be it from me to speak ill of someone’s hometown — I grew up in Florida after all — but the only other person I ever heard of who’d lived in Siberia was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who wrote a book about the brutal, bitter cold and isolated, forced labor camps scattered throughout that region.

Learning about my doctor’s background made me appreciate what it must have taken to get from Siberia to a respected medical practice here in the world’s entertainment capital. (I also spent a minute to read about what rheumatologists do: They deal with arthritis, inflammation and other assorted physical ailments that start showing up around my age.)

Still, I’m not sure I’ll ever recover from being medically classified as a Dean Martin guy.

I’m enjoying Margo’s Got Money Troubles, which has rolled out six of its eight episodes on Apple TV, with the finale scheduled for May 20. Another, Beef, dropped its 10 half-hours last month on Netflix, and I’m still avidly zipping through it. I may write more about those two here soon if there’s interest (let me know in Comments), but if this is the last you hear from me on them, take it as a strong, if premature, recommendation for both. The third is Big Mistakes, Dan Levy’s deeply twisted family comedy-drama-slash-crime-thriller that resists easy categorization.

I’ll finish this column on Big Mistakes, but first, let’s talk about some little ones.

Back in March I wrote an Oscar Substack and studiously avoided making a bunch of predictions about which awards would be handed out that week. I did stick my neck out on a few, though, and hardly considered them to be predictions at all. They were slam-dunks... except for one.

I thought it was time for the great character actor Delroy Lindo to cash in on the nationwide craze over Sinners, riding the film’s tidal wave of approval to a supporting actor win for his role as a Mississippi Delta blues musician. As I saw it, Lindo’s only real competition was Sean Penn in One Battle After Another. But Penn already had two Oscars, Lindo had none, and this was Sinners’ year, right?

Wrong. Penn snagged the Oscar and didn’t even show up to collect it. Sinners, despite its record 16 nominations, won only four awards to One Battle’s six. Lindo was shut out again.

Then, a few weeks later, with the Writers Guild negotiating a new contract that makes it harder for writers to earn or retain health insurance, and for that matter to keep working in the industry at all, I wrote that membership might defy its own negotiating committee and either reject the producers’ offer or approve it only narrowly. Well, results are in, and 90 percent of the guild’s voters approved the contract.

To be fair, pretty much every deal on record has passed with more than 90 percent support. Still, you’d have to say I missed on that one too.

The last mistake I want to mention wasn’t mine but the New York Times’. On Saturday, March 28, somewhere between eight and nine million people reportedly took to U.S. streets for No Kings Day protests, and I was disheartened to see hardly any print coverage the next day. Worse, the Times had a blurb in its “Morning” newsletter Sunday, noting that “thousands” of people had protested.

Thousands? It was millions, as I complained to readers in my March 30 column.

Of course, when events happen on Saturdays, media outlets often don’t employ enough staff to grasp the scale of a story until the weekend’s over. Which is why dozens of websites and even newspapers, clearly parroting the Times’ description, reported the same ”thousands” figure as if it were their own reporting. Any idiot could have turned on the TV and seen tens of thousands of people marching in each of a dozen different cities, with some, including L.A., Minneapolis and New York itself, drawing crowds in the hundreds of thousands.

By the next day, the Times had corrected itself: The editors meant there were thousands of rallies, not protesters. Oh well.

And the sleazy websites and newspapers that lifted the original misrepresentation without attribution? I haven’t seen any clarifications there, have you?

As annoying as those mistakes were, they’re nothing compared to the decisions made by the main characters in Big Mistakes, Dan Levy’s Netflix series, which premiered last month. Levy has taken the kind of claustrophobically close family he co-created with his dad in Schitt’s Creek, made its adult siblings far more emotionally estranged than the Rose family was in the Schitt house, and pushed the story into much darker territory.

Where Schitt’s Creek sometimes felt like a showcase for the comic brilliance of the late Catherine O’Hara, Dan Levy, Eugene Levy, and the latter’s electric eyebrows. Big Mistakes feels more like an eight-episode nervous breakdown with punchlines.

The younger Levy stars as Nicky, a gay pastor whose biggest problem, at first, seems to be how to reveal to his family the depth of his relationship with his boyfriend while concealing it from his church, where he’s expected to remain celibate.

Then the mistakes begin.

The first one comes with grandmother Nonna on her deathbed. Nicky’s mother Linda, a tightly wound emotional avalanche and local mayoral candidate played by Laurie Metcalf (Roseanne), insists he and his sister Morgan (Taylor Ortega) buy the fading matriarch a token of their affection. The two siblings pop into a gift shop run by an offbeat Russian proprietor, and Morgan makes a bad decision to pocket a supposedly fake-diamond necklace after the owner inexplicably refuses to sell it.

Big mistake.

The diamonds are real, and the surly shopkeeper Yusuf needs them to complete a mob deal too bizarre to spoil here.

The plot twists come rapid-fire from there, each more deranged than the last —starting with Nicky and Morgan being unable to retrieve the diamonds from dear, departed Nonna before she’s six feet under. Their all-night exhumation of said jewelry furthers their descent into a life of moral compromise and reluctant criminality.

What makes all the absurdity work is the effort Levy, co-creator Rachel Sennott, and the writing team put into crafting the show’s relationships. We can see how Linda’s manic narcissism drives the family dynamic into a ditch, fueling Nicky’s compulsive need to please and both siblings’ increasingly reckless behavior. (There’s also a younger sister, who seems surgically attached to Linda’s hip and is constantly paraded as the family’s exemplary child.)

Where it all leads is almost beside the point. Suffice it to say, the show packs more plot into its 30-minute episodes than some network dramas manage in an entire season, delivering all of it with a good blend of real suspense and black-comic hysteria.

Missing it would be a big mistake.

Which, today at least, is why I’m here.

Saturday, two things happened as I was trying to figure out what to write. One, a guest at the Washington Hilton took an express route through a main security checkpoint and was apparently stopped just outside the interior ballroom, where he allegedly shot a security guard in an attempt to run toward a bunch of administration big shots, including you-know-who, at the White House correspondents’ annual event.

Second, I realized Saturday marked the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Thunder Revue’s Gainesville stop. This was a historic concert for the University of Florida and for me personally. It took place during a hectic production weekend for New Look magazine, where I had just become editor and was in the midst of putting together my first issue.

Naturally, I snuck away from the hard work to attend what was probably the greatest concert of my life. I had to come back after the four-hour show, quickly write my first-ever New Look story, paste in Bob Wool’s excellent concert photos (some of which you can in this first image below), and finally get the magazine wrapped in time for our deadline at the printer.

If I cared more about juicing up my Substack numbers, I’d write about the biggest news story of the year out of Washington — at least until the next real or fake assassination attempt comes along, whichever the case may be.

But nah, I’m sticking with Rolling Thunder, and here’s why:

For those of you youngsters under 70, Bob Dylan is one of the great poets of our time, the only songwriter with a Nobel Prize in Literature. Unfortunately though, before and after his two Rolling Thunder tours in ’75 and ’76, he never really seemed to have much fun on stage.

He’s still writing great songs, still performing, and still rarely looking like he’s having any fun.

Dylan wanted those Rolling Thunder shows to be different, and if he couldn’t do it on his own, the all-stars in the traveling caravan he concocted — Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, and Kinky Friedman and The Texas Jewboys, among them — certainly could help. And they did, big-time.

Baez in particular seemed super-charged and ready for fun, beginning at least the night before the Gainesville show, when my friend, New Look writer Sharon Alford, chatted her up at the Great Southern Music Hall, where a young comic, Steve Martin, had just done his set. Baez was having a drink in the lobby, happily answering Sharon’s questions until T-Bone Burnett literally picked her up off her feet and carted her off, Sharon says.

Martin at that time was just starting to build his fan-base. The next day, most of the crowd had no idea who he was when he introduced Dylan’s show at Florida Field with a funny Ed Sullivan impression. I’m guessing he’d been invited by Joan.

Dylan, on the other hand, was coming off one of the great creative peaks in his long career. He had recently released Blood on the Tracks, widely considered to be one of his top three albums, which is saying a lot. He followed it up with Desire, for which he added Scarlet Rivera, a classically trained violinist with a dark, mysterious personal style, whose swooping melodic lines gave the music a swirling, nomadic edge. She was perfect for this revue, which Dylan at times performed in white face-paint like a carnival musician.

I was frustrated by his decision to quit touring in late 1975 before he got to Florida, and I was overjoyed by his decision to resume several months later with an Easter Sunday show in Lakeland, a couple of hours south of Gainesville, as his first date. Gainesville was scheduled for the following Sunday, and I attended both shows.

I also climbed a fence to get into the sound check at UF the night before and was able to chat with Rivera, who talked about how Dylan was changing set-lists, arrangements, even personnel from one show to the next. Very un-Dylan-like.

Still, the anniversary would’ve slipped my mind last weekend if it weren’t for a Facebook post by Jeff Goldstein who, 50 years ago, was a busy young concert promoter in Gainesville about to embark on the biggest venture of his life. Goldstein says he had a hand in putting on much of the music around Gainesville between 1970-’76, which was a very special time in that North Central Florida university town.

Goldstein convinced a booking agency to route Rolling Thunder through Gainesville, based on his assurance that he could secure the Gators’ football stadium as the venue. He had visions of UF opening the field to an additional 50,000 fans in what would have been the revue’s biggest crowd by far.

Trouble was, the university had no intention of letting that happen. Officials allowed a smaller show — still with more than 24,000 fans, which made it a huge success commercially as well as artistically.

Although there were a lot of complaints about the sky-high $8.75 ticket price.

Goldstein has a lot more to say about the run-up to that show, and you can find some of it on his Facebook page. I posted in his thread too, and got so much positive feedback that I decided to write this version for Substack and leave the D.C. drama to others this week.

Washington might have the bigger story, but Gainesville had the better one.

Is there another two-word phrase in the English language that evokes more immediate dread and anxiety?

My wife and I each got our notices on the same day a few months ago, and she took the route we’ve all traveled many times before, calling in with a good excuse to beg off. I may have been able to do that too, but part of me felt that after years of avoidance, it was time to do my civic duty, no matter how horribly inconvenient it might be.

Besides, I hoped to get a good Substack out of it.

So I got up early on the appointed day and headed out to the Superior Court building in Ventura, CA for an 8 a.m. call time. To orient you: I live in the County of Ventura, a few blocks away from our neighbors in L.A. The courthouse is in the city of Ventura, a couple of miles from the beach. So my 38-mile trek was almost certainly longer than anyone else’s in the jury pool that morning.

But no reason to gripe. It’s a smooth drive heading west at that hour and took me little more than half an hour to get there. Going the same distance in the other direction into the San Fernando Valley would have taken three times as long.

There were 74 of us potential jurors in the assembly room that morning, and we listened to a pleasant county official welcome us and introduce a couple of vital orientation videos. I think one of them may have prohibited us from posting about our experience on social media, but I wasn’t paying complete attention to that part; I was consumed by studying my fellow prospective jurors for signs of guilt or innocence. It’s good to get in some practice before the trial, right?

For instance, the guy two seats from me didn’t even begin to fill out the 21-page, incredibly personal questionnaire we were given. Either he didn’t read and write English or he knew something I didn’t.

I, however, did tackle the questionnaire and got through it in about 45 minutes. I’m not sure which questions I enjoyed answering less — the ones about my comfort level when hearing testimony about sexual abuse, or the ones that required me to recall in detail the murder of a friend many years ago.

This jury selection business was turning out to be less fun than I had hoped.

Next, we were sent upstairs to a courtroom, where we were greeted by the bailiff, who laid out some basic ground rules. Then we all stood as the judge entered and took the bench. He introduced himself, the prosecutor, the defense attorney and the defendant in the case, who bore a resemblance to the guy downstairs who wasn’t filling out the questionnaire. I don’t think it was him, but I can’t be sure.

The judge went into some basic judicial system stuff (presumption of innocence, burden of proof, impartiality, yada yada) and then gave us a brief overview of the case at hand. It indeed dealt with alleged sexual abuse, and of a minor yet. And if it went forward, it was expected to last the better part of a week.

He also told us we would not begin jury selection for six days, during which the attorneys would read our questionnaires and confer about the case. Which meant we had to free up our schedules for practically two weeks without even knowing if we’d be involved.

Accepting this jury summons without a fight was beginning to look less and less like a good idea, but it was too late now. I had promised myself — and the state — that I would do my duty.

So I went home and began canceling appointments for the following 12 days. Business appointments. Doctors appointments. Social engagements. (Well, not many of those, but there was one.) Did I mention doctors appointments?

On Wednesday the 15th I drove in again. This time, we were called for 9 a.m. We had been advised not to worry; the state would reimburse us for one-way mileage. I doubt any of us were planning to move into the building, so I don’t know how they get away with that one-way business, but that’s what they said.

We milled around in the hallway outside the courtroom until about 9:03, at which point the bailiff emerged, apologized for the inconvenience, and sent us all home. The case had been removed from the trial calendar for unspecified reasons, and the jury panel was dismissed.

I’m off the hook for another year. Next time, I may take my wife’s approach.

Extra credit: What’s the best excuse you’ve come up with to avoid serving on a jury? Or if you’ve gone in, what was your experience like? Answer in Comments.

Extra extra credit: Isn’t it about time you considered becoming a paid subscriber? And no, those two words shouldn’t create more anxiety than “jury duty.” Which would you really rather avoid? Getting called away from your life, job and family to dwell in a bureaucratic morass over an indeterminate period of time, or helping a writer/creator/reporter/friend pay his bills?

It was a remarkably smooth negotiation, except for one thing: The membership wasn’t kept up to speed, and now that details are emerging, the agreement doesn’t appear to have great support.

Historically, that hasn’t mattered. Writers have approved every contract our negotiating committee has recommended, which is why this one is widely being treated as a done deal.

And it may be, but I’m not so sure.

The guild, hit hard by reduced dues revenues during and after its 2023 strike, needed a significant cash infusion to help keep its health plan afloat. That was a big ask, and it put the writers in a weak bargaining position from the outset.

The producers agreed to help — at a price. They pushed for a five-year contract instead of the traditional three. The two sides settled on four years, which is a long time in an industry where the underlying economics, and the impact of AI, are changing so rapidly. (Safeguarding against the AI risk was one of the important issues that didn’t seem to make it off the bargaining table this go-around.)

The trades are widely reporting a $321 million contribution from producers, but that figure is misleading. The AMPTP is putting up $280 million, with the other $41 million coming from the guild itself, which is redirecting it from existing funds — meaning less money for parental leave, residuals and other member benefits. Even with that infusion, a lot fewer members will qualify for health insurance, and those who do will face higher co-pays and deductibles.

Bottom line, it sucks, just as health care does for the rest of the country. Of course, the WGA’s once-excellent plan has long been a stabilizing force for many members, who depend on sporadic gig work to pay their bills.

The guild’s negotiators clearly realized this and did the best they could, but the AMPTP has priorities other than keeping mid-level writers happy. (The top-tier writers, the ones running network shows or churning out superhero sequels, can more easily weather the proposed changes.)

The larger issue is what the other side was willing to concede.

For instance, Warner Bros. Discovery president David Zaslav recently secured a reported $887 million severance and equity package. At Paramount Skydance, David Ellison and two other top executives are due to share about $14 million in salary and bonuses this year, plus stock grants worth roughly $210 million.

Those are the same companies arguing there isn’t enough money to help maintain the health benefits that make a writing career viable.

That’s not a negotiating problem; it’s a priorities problem. And it’s not happening in a vacuum.

We’ve spent years celebrating a version of negotiation in this country that treats every deal as a contest to be won, not something that works for all parties.

As the ancient Greek historian Thucydides put it, the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.

Take Iran. Please.

The negotiations have collapsed. The situation has escalated. The United States, as of this writing, is now blockading ports and talking about broader military action instead of any kind of durable agreement.

That’s not leverage. It’s failure with elevated risk.

Even with much of its military destroyed, Iran has adapted and endured. Russia has absorbed pressure and adjusted. China continues to expand its reach.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is left asserting strength while demonstrating less and less control over outcomes that were manageable until recently.

In one case, it is labor negotiations that might torpedo careers, companies, even city- and statewide economies. In the other, it is geopolitics at the scale of war and peace. The stakes are hardly comparable, but the underlying logic is the same.

A deal is presented as a success, and as the outcome becomes clear, the gap between the two hits us like a cold, hard, slap in the face.

For the record, I should disclose here that I am now what the WGA classifies as a post-current member, meaning I’m not currently eligible to vote on contract ratifications. I have been part of this system for much of my working life, and as someone who has earned lifetime health coverage, I still live with the consequences of the guild’s decisions, even when I am no longer part of the formal voting process.

But the point is, the level of bullshit between the Trump-Iran fiasco and a guild contract negotiation is not comparable in scale, consequence, or seriousness, but they do intersect in a limited way. In both cases, what we are led to believe and what’s true are worlds apart.

And that matters.

Because guild members have to make a decision inside that gap between what they were led to expect and what the deal actually delivers.

Some will conclude it’s the best possible outcome under the circumstances. Others will say hell no. But whatever their decision, it will be made under the weight of tremendous disappointment.

And that is part of the deal too.

The conversation was a lot of fun — for Tom and me at least — and you should all check it out as soon as you can. When you do, you might want to skip the first 88 seconds of us trying to figure out what’s going on and go right for the more important nonsense that follows.

Here’s a poorly edited clip from Substack itself, just to give you a taste. I’ll try to get some better clips posted later.

I finally figured out that was a ridiculous, self-imposed restriction.

Why not feature a friend if he happens to be a renowned author and editor and a smart, engaging guy with a bunch of great stories about people he’s worked with, Pulitzer Prizes he’s helped them win, and stories he’s covered for top newspapers and magazines… even if his golf game does occasionally fall apart when his competitive juices gets the better of him.

By now, you may know I’m talking about Tom Shroder, the former longtime editor of both the Washington Post’s and Miami Herald’s excellent Sunday magazines; author of Old Souls, the groundbreaking exploration of the possibility of past lives that’s currently being developed by Hollywood; and ghostwriter of The Operator, former SEAL team leader Robert O’Neill’s memoir about becoming the man to fire the shots that killed Osama bin Laden.

That little number was an instant New York Times bestseller and sold more than a half-million copies.

In addition to that small sample of his accomplishments, Shroder recently launched a rapidly growing Substack where regular readers have been fascinated to watch him develop a deep and highly “personal” relationship with his new editing partner, ChatGPT.

Don’t be fooled by the column’s whimsical tagline, “I Chat With Chat (so you don’t have to).” Shroder produces content as often as three to five times a week, digging deep into AI’s capabilities and explaining in intricate detail how he makes it work to serve him — something that, like it or not, we’ll all need to learn soon in every field, and in everyday life, to stay on top of our game.

At the same time, he also weighs in on the threats Chat presents to our jobs, our culture, and theoretically, to humanity itself. He does this by intensively questioning the single most qualified source on those issues — ChatGPT itself, which answers Tom’s piercing questions in a conversant and authoritative way.

I’ve known Tom since our college days at the University of Florida, where we met in the newsroom of what was then, and to some extent still is, clearly one of the top few student-run newspapers in the country. By virtue of the fact that I began working at the paper months before he did, I was a “seasoned veteran” news editor when he sauntered into the office one day and asked what he would need to do to start working there.

“Show up,” I told him. And he did, becoming one of our top reporters within weeks.

Shroder and I will be talking about those good ol’ days and much more when he joins me Tuesday at 11 a.m. Pacific time, 2 p.m. in the East. You’re invited too, and if you log on while we’re live, we’ll welcome your comments and questions and respond to as many as we can.

Regular readers are automatically notified when these live conversations are about to begin — one of many benefits you get from subscribing to my Substack. You can do that now for free if you haven’t already done so, by clicking one of those buttons you see all over the place.

Or become a paid subscriber and enjoy the warm, fuzzy feeling you’ll get from knowing you’re helping me keep the place running.

If you can’t make it live on Tuesday, you can still watch any time after that, though without being able to actively participate in the conversation. The link will be posted here on my Substack page permanently.

So swing by and join us if you can. And if you have questions in advance, post ’em below!

I’m a few days late for No Kings Day, but with Passover around the corner, liberation is on my mind more than usual this year.

The good news is, eight or nine million people turned out at various rallies across the U.S. to express everything from disaffection to outrage in colorful — sometimes off-colorful — ways. The bad news is, not all newspapers covered these nationwide rallies, and the ones that did so, on Sunday at least, generally downplayed the turnout by saying “thousands of people” took to the streets nationally.

Heck, thousands of people were marching within 10 miles of my house, and I’m not even in Los Angeles, where the crowd size downtown was estimated to have approached 100,000. But there were 40 other rallies around L.A. county, many of them with thousands of other peaceful protesters. San Francisco had about 100,000 downtown. San Diego, 40,000. And that’s only in a few California cities.

In St. Paul, Minnesota, there were said to be close to 200,000 in attendance. Of course Bruce Springsteen performed his new song “Minneapolis” there. Joan Baez and others sang too.

Seattle, Philly, Detroit, Texas, South Florida — they all had tens of thousands of protesters, including a couple of thousand within a few miles of Mar-a-Lago.

New York City reported between 100,000 and 350,000 across the five boroughs, with activists including Robert De Niro joining the Manhattan march and the NYPD reporting exactly zero conduct-related arrests.

Yet the New York Times could only muster an estimate of “thousands of people” nationwide in Sunday’s “The Morning” newsletter. I understand being cautious, but at a certain point, playing it safe becomes misleading. They might have well taken it another step and reported that “dozens” of U.S. protesters showed up.

It’s funny how the Jewish calendar has a knack for hitting the nail on the head. I called attention to the same phenomenon in my Yom Kippur post at the end of September, when Congress skipped town and U.S. military leaders abandoned their bases around the world, just as our day of quiet reflection and repentance arrived.

I don’t know how we keep getting the timing so right on these things. It’s probably the space lasers.

This time it’s the Passover holiday. For those who skipped Sunday school, the holiday commemorates our liberation from 400 years of Egyptian slavery more than 3,300 years ago. According to the text, God sent 10 plagues upon the Egyptian people to convince their ruler to let us go. Pharaoh held fast against the first nine — he was a hard-ass ruler after all — but the tenth plague finally did the trick.

It was the killing of each family’s first-born son — which happened to be Pharaoh’s own, personal demographic. Then as now, self-interest is the only thing stronger than a tyrant’s ego.

Scholars believe Jews first began celebrating their newfound freedom the very next year, and have been doing so ever since. It’s kind of amazing. Two Seders a year for 3,300 years, and we still haven’t figured out a better opening dish than gefilte fish.

While our Christian neighbors celebrate Easter with baked ham, spring vegetables, and candy hidden in pretty eggs, we Jews mark our liberation with horseradish and matzah, a flourless cracker that tastes like fresh-baked cardboard.

There’s often delicious food at the Seder too, but the no-flour rule lasts eight days and also includes anything made with lentils, peas, many seeds, and five different kinds of grains, not to mention anything that may have come into contact with any of those ingredients.

Not all Jews follow the rules, of course, but many — even non-Orthodox ones — try their best. We take freedom from our oppressors quite seriously, having faced some pretty cruel ones over the millennia.

This year, we should add some new plagues to the 10 we’ve recited each Seder since ancient times. These new ones have begun to spread ever since our current, kingly leader began his first term. In the Seder tradition, you dip a finger into the red wine and touch it to your Seder plate as each plague is named.

1. Covid-19

2. Racial unrest

3. Extreme weather/wildfires

4. Deportations

5. Measles resurgence

6. Deepfakes (in social media and politics)

7. Polarization

8. Gas prices (check out the sign in the protest photo above)

9. The loneliness epidemic

That leaves us waiting for a tenth, the one that finally convinces our heartless overlord to step aside and return the keys to our democracy. If history repeats itself, it’ll be that last one that hits him where it hurts.

The devaluation of gold? A national shortage of Big Macs? Sudden death for sexual miscreants?

I’m hoping we don’t have to find out.

Is there a more exciting decree in the English language than those two words?

They snap us into a new mindset, bracing us for action, to challenge and respond. Competition exists away from the baseball diamond to be sure, but nowhere else does it smell like freshly mown grass and sound like the buzzing support of an animated crowd.

And when all else is bleak, that simple directive, Play ball!, can shut out the world and focus one’s attention on the moment as effectively as a swami’s meditative trance or a muezzin’s call to prayer.

Major League Baseball’s Opening Day is Wednesday this season, with all 30 teams in action by Friday, and fans will once again hear that umpire’s command in big league cities and on TV.

I began umpiring youth baseball games last year and recently started my second season behind the plate and in the field.

It’s harder than it looks.

In Agoura Pony Baseball, where local kids play in parks and on school grounds nestled in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, umpires train for eight weeks each year during their first three seasons. Some might consider it simple, involving only weekly, one-hour classroom sessions and a couple of weekend mornings in the field.

We’re instructed to read the Major League Baseball rulebook on our own, along with the Pony League rules for each different age level, and we’re tested on all of it.

Safety and fairness are the league’s bywords and the umpires’ responsibility. We’re also taught how to look the part, to project confidence, and to control the game.

Most of the umps are schoolkids, looking to make some pocket money and help teach baseball to younger kids in a fun, family atmosphere. More experienced, older kids and young adults usually handle the upper divisions, which go to age 14.

I’m one of only eight or 10 old-timers doing it in our league.

So what makes a grown man with a family and work responsibilities carve out time to help kids, ages 7 and up, learn to play organized baseball?

In my case, it started long ago with a love for the game, first as a fan, then as a player. I enjoyed all sports as a kid but had a special affinity for softball, then baseball, which I began playing in earnest in seventh grade, after my family moved to the Miami area.

I went to Coral Gables High, where the football coach at the time was the legendary Nick Kotys, a man who, when he retired in 1972, had led the team to six titles in that football-crazy state. Sportswriters crowned them national champions for four of those seasons. These were considered by some to be “mythical” championships, but nobody ever said that to Kotys.

I liked football, but Kotys’ teams usually fielded 100 or more players and required the kind of hard work and competitive drive that made college and the pros look like sandlot. I decided against playing football, and the team got by fine without me, eventually sending four of my 1971 senior year classmates to the NFL, where they were pretty big stars.

Clearly, baseball was my best shot at playing a high school sport. I was a good Pony League player, but not as good as my friend, Pete Manos, who was our team’s best pitcher and shortstop. I was facing him one day in batting practice, and I was swinging the bat pretty well, smacking the ball all over the field.

Then Pete gave me a devilish smile from the mound, which I was trying to interpret as he went into his windup and threw the ball right at my ear!

In the half-second it takes for an 80 mph pitch to reach home plate, I had time to wonder what the hell had gotten into my friend Pete. I bailed out of there… and watched his curveball break right over the plate for a strike. I had seen weak curveballs before but nothing like this. That was the end of any serious baseball aspirations I might’ve had.

Still, I wanted to make the Gables team, which I failed to do in 10th grade. But by the next year, I had grown a little and was able to make it all the way through the final cut.

Nick Kotys didn’t coach baseball, but he was the school’s athletic director, so all teams reflected his work ethic and demand for excellence. Which meant, among other things, we did a lot of wind sprints.

If you’ve ever done wind sprints in the Miami heat and humidity, you’ve probably gotten away with giving 80 or 90 percent effort for each 50-meter dash performed in rapid succession, with only 30 seconds of recovery time in between. That didn’t cut it in Kotys’ program or on Coach Sam Scarnecchia’s baseball team. We went all out, or we went home.

I had to make that choice pretty much every day.

One of those days, I was trotting out to the practice field after school – one did not walk to practice at Gables High, something the Agoura Pony Leaguers might do well to learn – and I passed Coach Kotys, who was standing in the outfield surveying his domain. This was 1970, and my hair may have been a little on the shaggy side,

“I didn’t know Coach Scarnecchia allows girls on his team,” Kotys called out as I jogged past.

And do you know what I said?

Nothing, are you kidding? This was Nick Kotys, and I was 16 years old. I just kept on jogging.

But I got his point, and in his own, Neanderthal way, he was right. I hated wind sprints, I couldn’t hit a good curveball, and I had only gone out for the team to prove to myself that I could make it. What I did not prove — or care to prove — was that I had the will and desire to work hard enough to succeed on that team under trying conditions.

That was my last day as a Gables High athlete. I lacked the maturity to quit to Scarnecchia’s face, so I just never came back. It’s not something I’m proud of, but baseball can be useful that way. It has a knack for showing you who you are.

I later became an avid softball player, raised two sports-loving kids, and helped coach their teams, including a couple of seasons in Agoura Pony Baseball.

And still, I kept playing.

By my mid-60s, with a slight limp and slower reflexes, I had to admit I was no longer much of an asset to my high-arc team, mostly guys in their 30s and 40s.

When a non-softball injury cost me a season, I knew it was probably time to hang up my orthopedic cleats. But I couldn’t entirely give up the game.

So now on any given day outside school hours, you might still find me on the diamond — the old guy with the bad knee, keeping the game safe, fair, and moving.

Play ball.

Video games were just a bleep-bloop-pew on the horizon. The Internet hadn’t yet caught us in its web. And TikTok wasn’t even on the clock.

But films, which have provided widespread escape and inspiration for America since the 1930s and ’40s, and network television, which began permeating our culture in the ’50s, have felt like they’d never loosen their grip on popular culture.

Oscar day — today! — is traditionally when they come together.

Never mind that box office totals in general and TV ratings for the broadcast have been steadily eroding, or that the ceremony is ditching network television altogether in 2028 and will be moving to YouTube the following year. The show is still a very big deal, as Hollywood takes our temperature on everything from art and fashion to politics and culture.

Think about this: In 2015, all 20 nominees in the acting categories were white. Of course, by 2016 — no, wait, in 2016 it happened again. Best actor and supporting actor, best actress and supporting actress — all white. Two years in a row, 40 nominations.

#OscarsSoWhite became a major social media hashtag then, forcing the Academy to pay more attention to racial disparities than at any time since 1973, when Apache actress Sacheen Littlefeather took the stage at Marlon Brando’s behest to decline his best actor award for The Godfather. Brando was protesting Hollywood’s insensitivity toward Native Americans and never accepted the trophy.

Did Hollywood listen? Well, Littlefeather wasn’t given time to read much of Brando’s eight-page statement and was effectively blacklisted from future work in film and television. But at least John Wayne, who rushed toward the stage, was prevented from physically ejecting her. So there’s that.

By comparison, #OscarsSoWhite had much greater impact. Coming during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which surged a few years later after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, the Academy was aware enough to name Chris Rock as host in 2016, and Rock addressed the issue head-on with his signature biting humor throughout the night.

The Academy was slow to respond, but stars didn’t let up and neither did the fans. Eventually, the powers that be agreed to a five-year plan, effectively doubling the number of women and minorities in the Academy.

And now, a decade later, let me be the first to pre-congratulate Michael B. Jordan for his historic seventh NBA championship first Oscar win for playing not one but two roles as identical twins in Sinners, a film that probably wouldn’t have been made earlier this century, much less be honored with 16 nominations, more than any other film in history. You can see him collect his statue and hear what he has to say about it all tonight, probably sometime during the final hour of the ABC telecast.

Because of the changing demographic makeup of Academy voters, and I’m especially thinking here about its youthification, I don’t feel too qualified to make a lot of predictions. But some winners, like Jordan, are slam-dunks.

Jessie Buckley, best actress nominee for Hamnet? Start clearing mantel space and writing your acceptance speech. Delroy Lindo for Sinners? Your lifetime achievement award in the form of a supporting actor win is coming tonight. Paul Thomas Anderson? You’ve been nominated as best director three times before, but this fourth one for One Battle After Another will be your first victory.

As for best picture — not a slam-dunk but most pundits see it going to either One Battle or Sinners, and I have no more insight than that to add.

Truth is, I’m not too invested in winners and losers this year, but I am hoping to see some great acceptance speeches. If they’re in line with my political views, so much the better.

My best shot there would have been Sean Penn, who’s nominated for a quirky, larger-than-life performance in One Battle After Another. Penn is known for speaking his mind whenever he’s got a platform, but I’ve already given that category to Lindo.

We’ll just have to hope for some surprises, and luckily there are always a few.

Thanks to all who’ve checked out my podcasting debut a week ago, especially those of you who joined us live with questions and comments that we never saw or responded to because of a careless, technical oversight that I attribute to first-time jitters.

I’ll do better next time, I promise.

The conversation was still great, mainly because of my guest, the celebrated anti-war activist and Vietnam veteran, Scott Camil, who generously shared incredible stories from his 50-plus years in the public eye and beyond. A link to our talk will remain available on my Substack page for those who missed it.

Substack is doing more to make these livestream conversations appealing to hosts, guests and viewers alike, and I intend to keep at it until things are running a little more smoothly.

So stay with me, send suggestions for possible future topics and guests, and if you’re not yet a paying subscriber, now would be a great time to upgrade.

Of course, free subscribers are appreciated too, so spread the word and let’s keep building our community.

Movies and TV, politics, sports… There’s a lot of pop culture out there to assimilate. You might as well start off here.

I was watching the new Paul McCartney documentary Friday, the day it started streaming on Prime, planning to write about it for those who, like me, can’t get enough of the guy. So here’s a short review:

You know how McCartney started a new band, Wings, in 1971, hoping it would enable him to move on from the Beatles, even though no one in the world would have paid much attention to the band if the guy from the Beatles wasn’t the one who started it, sang the vast majority of its lead vocals, and wrote almost all its songs?

And then he got frustrated because most of us viewed it as a band that didn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as the Beatles if it weren’t for McCartney’s massive involvement.

Well, that’s how this movie, Paul McCartney: Man on the Run. is too. It begins with audio of the recording of “Silly Love Songs,” which pretty much sets the tone, and explores in detail such subjects as Paul’s quest to figure out his musical and personal identity after the Beatles’ breakup, and his finding personal peace and contentment with his family on their Scotland farm.

Nice stuff but not exactly gripping material.

Along the way, we learn Linda McCartney was the first person he asked to join the new band, even though she started out unable to play any instrument or be an impactful backup vocalist and ended up largely the same way.

Director Morgan Neville (20 Feet from Stardom, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?) gives us contemporaneous voice-over only from Paul, his family members, some bandmates from Wings and a handful of others, including brief comments from Mick Jagger and more extensive ones from Chrissie Hynde. Hynde was founder and lead singer of the Pretenders, though that’s not mentioned in the film. She presumably was close with Linda through their shared love for animals and strong connection to PETA. That’s not acknowledged either.

More annoyingly, none of these people are ever shown on screen, except of course Paul and Linda, in archival footage. Perhaps Neville wanted to keep us focused on the past without showing a bunch of gray-haired, former rockers reflecting on it. Didn’t work for me.

The movie is most interesting during its infrequent lapses back into Beatles lore, especially during a time after their breakup where McCartney grouses about John Lennon’s diss track, “How Do You Sleep?.” He quotes Lennon’s line, “The only thing you done was ‘Yesterday,’” and bitterly responds, (I’m paraphrasing), “If all I ever did was ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Let It Be,’ ‘The Long and Winding Road,’ ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ ‘Lady Madonna’...

“How do I sleep at night? Well, actually, quite well.”

It was an authentic glimpse of a side of McCartney the film deals with early — how badly he was stung by Lennon’s criticism and the public perception of him as the prima donna who broke up the Beatles.

Unfortunately, we get too little of that and too much hagiographic treatment of Paul as the poor misunderstood superstar.

You’d think people would’ve had enough of silly love songs, but when it comes to McCartney, we can see it isn’t so.

If I had switched over to CNN when I finished watching the movie, I would’ve learned the disturbing news that our fearless leader in the Whites-only House had pulled the trigger on what may be turning into another cataclysmic U.S.-Mideast war.

Of course, there are other interpretations of these rapidly unfolding events. My Israeli friends are cautiously optimistic, and I’m sure, millions of Persians, both in Iran and here in “Tehrangeles,” are elated to see the death of the man who helped transform their great civilization into a miserable center of corruption, repression and terror.

The story is just beginning, though, and it might well continue for years.

So what better time to announce the first guest on my upcoming Substack livestream, the renowned antiwar activist, Scott Camil.

If you don’t know Camil from his days as regional head of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, his extensive testimony about the war before Congress, his unsuccessful prosecution in the Gainesville Eight conspiracy trial of 1973, or his targeting and near-murder by the Drug Enforcement Administration two years later, you can read about him here in one of my previous posts.

We’ll be talking more about his fascinating personal history, as well as his take on current events and, I hope, how we can help shape them. The livestream is set for this Sunday at 2 pm Pacific time and 5 in the East. (We’re switching to Daylight Savings that day too, so don’t forget to spring forward the night before.)

I’ll figure out how to re-post the session when we finish, but only those watching live will be able to key in questions and comments in real time, and we’ll address those as well as we can.

The stream will be open to everyone — paid and free subscribers, as well as those checking in for the first time. Of course, it’s the paid subscribers who make it all possible, so please, do your best to help keep this thing going, both in text and, starting Sunday, with monthly live audio/video guest conversations.

We’ll see you then!

It was a very tough time for the whole industry. Television jobs reportedly fell by 42% that season and never fully recovered. Partly because of that, the Writers Guild Health Fund is now hurting more than ever and we may have to strike again when our contract expires in May to make sure the studios help shore it up.

In the meantime, we apparently couldn’t wait the two-and-a-half years to square off in another labor dispute, which is why the Writers Guild of America West now finds itself on the wrong end of a separate issue — this one with our own staff.

Yep, the people who answer our phones and send out our residual checks say we’re not treating them fairly. They’ve formed a union and have gone on strike, picketing guild headquarters on 3rd and Fairfax in L.A., and shutting down our library and movie theater, among other things.

There are 150-something members of this new staff union. They say 64% of their members make less than about $85,000 a year, which frankly sounds like they’re in the same ballpark as the writers themselves. Sad to say, that’s not a comfortable full-time salary in Los Angeles, and unlike the writers, the staffers have no hope of shooting up to six or seven figures if they land a great assignment.

I’ll set aside the merits of their complaint for now. As you can imagine, there are good arguments, and also some weak ones, on both sides.

In any case, it’s a bad look for the Writers Guild, which is about to launch its campaign against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, asking for greater protections against Artificial Intelligence as well as health plan improvements. Word is, we also hope to gain a foothold in the burgeoning market for short-form projects (sometimes called “vertical video”) on platforms like YouTube, Facebook and TikTok.

I can just imagine our negotiating committee sitting down with the producers’ team of lawyers at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, where the AMPTP has its offices, while the guild’s secretaries and assistants picket the building outside. The media are gonna love that!

As it happens, I have direct experience with both the costs and benefits of a protracted strike.

In 1988, I had been a guild member for a year or two and had already written episodes for Miami Vice, Hunter and Cagney & Lacey, worked as a story editor on the original MacGyver, and gotten an assignment with my then-partner Michael Berlin to write an original screenplay that was headed for production.

It was a very hot start to a new career, and we introduced ourselves to the rest of Hollywood with an ad in one of the trade papers.

Michael and I had gotten the movie deal thanks to a friend who was working at Vestron Productions. Some of you may remember that company as a pioneer in home video, which had become a thing in the early ‘80s.

They had kick-started that whole industry, mostly by licensing and selling B movies, exercise videos and the like, and were now moving into production of original films like Dirty Dancing, which became a huge surprise hit in 1987.

Unlike the bigger studios, Vestron was known to be very careful with its finances. They made almost every project they developed, and they’d already paid for our script, loved the first draft, hired a director and sent him to scout locations in Mexico. If Dirty Dancing could achieve blockbuster status on its modest $6 million budget, Michael and I were confident our little action thriller could do the same.

We worked with producers to get notes on the script and had just gotten the green light for a second draft when the WGA called the 1988 strike.

Every day we’d drive out to an assigned studio, grab our picket signs and march for a few hours, then head back to my place and work on the second draft of our Vestron script. As long as we weren’t handing anything in, we felt we were okay.

It would take a couple of months to get the draft in shape, and by then we hoped the strike would be settled. But it wasn’t.

For another week or two, when we weren’t marching, we’d polish our script and try to figure out our next move. Eventually, we started writing a new spec.

Soon after that, we got a call from my friend at Vestron. She said she knew we didn’t want to hand in our draft, but maybe we could meet her for lunch somewhere and bring it with us. If we accidentally forgot to take it home, no one would know or care.

As proud guild members, we regretfully declined.

A couple of weeks later she called us again. That restaurant meeting she brought up last time — it wouldn’t necessarily have to be in the U.S. I wasn’t sure if she was offering to pay for this hypothetical rendezvous in another country, and I didn’t want to ask. We just said no thanks.

The strike stretched out to 22 weeks before it was finally settled, becoming what is still the longest in WGA history — five days longer than 2023’s grueling affair. Michael and I excitedly called my friend and told her we were ready to deliver.

That’s when we learned our script wouldn’t be produced. Vestron was headed into bankruptcy.

Our incipient film career was dead in the water, along with the company that assigned it and who knows how many others. Our TV contacts had cooled off quite a bit too.

That was the bad news. The good news was, the guild did achieve many of its goals in that strike. We writers protected our residual earning formulas and expanded them in foreign markets and in cable, both of which were starting to take off.

Could I have lived without that strike? Sure. We might’ve become the next red-hot screenwriting team, churning out hit movies year after year… or maybe not. But partly because of my steady residual stream, I was able to fashion a long TV career and qualify my whole family for guild health coverage for 18 consecutive years. Everyone with at least 17 qualified years becomes covered for life, thank you very much.

We also made sure that future writers would enjoy those same benefits.

What I learned from that strike is, each side always thinks the other is being unreasonable. While corporate greed may sometimes play a part, the truth is, business climates are constantly changing, and players in all sectors need to negotiate and make concessions to survive.

Let’s hope the WGA and its staffers figure that one out real soon.

People say, “Believe half of what you see
Son, and none of what you hear
But I can't help but be confused
If it’s true, please, tell me, dear

I recently saw a report on Facebook of Mario Cristobal, the University of Miami’s football coach, stunning a room full of billionaires at a Los Angeles gala by telling them they need to donate part of their wealth to charitable causes.

I don’t know much about Cristobal outside his success at UM, but common sense told me this was ridiculous. Why would a football coach be brought across the country to talk to such a group, and why would he deliver such a pro-social message? Doesn’t he ever want to get invited anywhere again?

I checked with Google Gemini, which first implied the event actually occurred because there had indeed been social media reports about it, but upon further questioning reversed course and acknowledged there was an extremely low probability those reports were real.

I’ve since seen many other bogus Facebook posts on different subjects from various providers (that’s what I get for clicking on the Cristobal item) and have judiciously blocked each one. But what’s the point? The bullshit keeps flying around faster than most of us can get out of the way.

Scammers and charlatans have always searched for new ways to trick the gullible. Now AI is helping even those who don’t speak good English do it in ways that society might perceive as less harmful than outright theft. Who even knows what their precise business model is? Clearly, it has to do with using algorithms to gain clicks, which can be monetized in any number of ways in our attention-based economy.

My friend Lee Goldberg has a different but related issue and deals with it in a manner many of his thousands of Facebook friends find amusing. As a prolific, New York Times bestselling novelist (and also a longtime TV writer/producer), Goldberg is constantly targeted by emailers who assume the identities of other prominent writers, trying to strike up virtual relationships with him to exploit in book marketing scams.

To be clear, these scammers are allegedly attempting to do much worse than spread “harmless” misinformation on social media. An ambitious prosecutor might say they’re committing investment fraud, which if successful, is punishable by up to 25 years in federal prison.

Most of us would probably block and ignore these people, but Goldberg says some writers, especially newer ones, are vulnerable to such attacks. He enjoys engaging with the scammers until he humiliates them and publishes verbatim copies of the correspondence on his Facebook page and his blog in order to raise awareness among possible future victims.

He’s given me permission to re-post parts of those conversations here.

Around Christmas time, he told one correspondent, who was pretending to be the clinical psychologist and non-fiction writer Lindsay Gibson, that he was really glad to hear from her for a reason I’m sure she didn’t expect.

“My fellow authors have been avoiding me ever since I lost my testicles in a tragic tree-trimming accident,” he wrote to the fake Gibson. “It’s so mean. It’s not as if what happened to me is a virus they can catch if they visit me in the hospital.”

Goldberg told the fake shrink and author that he intends to write about his experience and asked if she thought his story has a chance of connecting with an audience. “I do worry a lot about how this accident will impact my sex life and my sense of manhood,” he wrote, “but on the plus side, my singing voice has improved.”

The fake Gibson appeared to take him seriously and spewed out many words of sympathetic, writerly prose before turning the conversation toward marketing: “Are you doing anything special to spotlight [your work] for readers who are searching for thoughtful, heartfelt books at this time of year?”

Goldberg responded that it didn’t feel like a real Christmas book to him, though he allowed that Jingle Bells might be a good title. He never heard from the fake Gibson again.

Others are more persistent. One writer, pretending to be the novelist Ann Napolitano, protested when Goldberg clearly pointed out he had her number.

Goldberg: Let’s be honest, you are not Ann. I ran your email through an AI-detector, and it came back positive. So I am curious. Does pretending to be a famous author, and recommending people to a “marketing expert” in Nigeria, really work for you…?”

Confronted with this, the fake Ann admitted he/she/they were not the real bestselling author they were impersonating, said there was no intention to mislead him, and went on to shower him with all manner of apology, respect and praise for his work, couching it in a couple of hundred words of flowery, AI-sounding language.

Their conversation ended this way:

Goldberg: If you did not want to be mistaken for Ann Napolitano, and if you “take trust seriously,” why are you using her name and profile photo? And why are you using AI to write your emails? It defies common sense. Why continue to pretend this isn’t a scam when you’ve been thoroughly exposed as a fraud…?

Fake Ann: FUCK DOG YOU.

I’m guessing the scammer didn’t use AI for that one.

Goldberg says many aspiring writers reach out to thank him for helping steer them clear of disaster. He says he sometimes uses an actual plagiarism-detector that he borrows from his daughter, a schoolteacher, to confirm his assumptions, but usually he can tell on his own when posts and emails are bogus.

He even sometimes asks ChatGPT or Claude if posts seem to have been composed with AI. They always confirm his suspicions and identify specific giveaways.

In any case, the reposts of his conversations are usually pretty entertaining. I’d recommend his blog or his Facebook page, but I don’t know if he’s taking new friend requests right now.

If he accepts you, just don’t try to sell him anything.

For instance, we know that roughly 130 million people will be watching the New England Patriots play the Seattle Seahawks for the NFL championship, making it TV’s highest rated broadcast of the year, as it has been every year since 1993 when viewership for the series finale of Cheers slightly exceeded it.

We also know that many of those people won’t actually be watching the action. They’ll be chatting with friends, drinking 325 million gallons of beer, and consuming roughly 2,923 calories worth of food. Much of that will come from 23.4 million pounds of chips pretzels. They’ll get their protein from nearly a billion and a half chicken wings.

Viewers will probably tune in closely for the game’s commercials, which this year will heavily feature AI — both in their production and in their content. ChatGPT and Claude, for instance, are going head to head in a secondary Super Bowl of their own, and NBC is collecting $8-10 million for each 30-second spot.

What we don’t know yet is who will actually win the football game, and most viewers don’t even care too much unless they live in Seattle or New England, or they have money riding on the outcome. Legal gambling has become big business in the sports world, with fans projected to wager an estimated $1.76 billion on the outcome.

For most of us, all of that is secondary to the game’s most highly anticipated spectacle, by which I mean the halftime show. Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican headliner, has been the most streamed artist globally on Spotify in five of the past six years and consistently sells out massive stadium shows all over the world. He just won two Grammys for his 2025 album and another for best global music performance. His winning record was the first-ever Spanish language album to win in its category.

Naturally, the Trumpers don’t like him, and that includes at least one anonymous player, who was quoted saying he didn’t see why we couldn’t get an American star to perform instead.

Puerto Rico, of course, is a U.S. territory, and its citizens are Americans.

Be that as it may, English is not Bad Bunny’s first language, and we can only hope ICE is not there to take him away, at least before halftime.

Luckily for my MAGA readers, there will be an alternative halftime show starring Kid Rock at roughly the same time. I’ll let those of you who are interested figure out how to tune in.

So now we come to my analysis of who will win the actual game. After the Washington Post’s legendary sports section was shut down earlier this week, and with the New York Times having outsourced its own sports coverage back in 2023, readers are naturally clamoring for my opinion.

I’ve done a great deal of research because I know how important this is, especially to you gamblers who are not done placing your bets, and I don’t mean putting dollars on the charts your host drew up with random squares.

Study the analytics all you want, but it basically comes down to three things: offense, defense, and cheating.

Most analysts give the edge to the Seahawks for their offense. They have a great passing game, highlighted by one of the league’s top receivers, whose name I can neither spell nor pronounce.

The Seahawks also have the advantage with their lights-out defense. (It’s actually known as the Dark Side, a phrase you’ll hear several times during the game when the team comes up with a big stop.)

The Seahawks perform well in the cheating department too, with multiple rule infractions during offseason workouts and a league-leading number of performance-enhancing drug violations. (It’s true; look it up.)

Still, when it comes to cheating, they don’t belong on the same field as the historic Patriots teams, which were notorious for the 2007 Spygate controversy, during which they were caught illegally videotaping their opponents’ defensive signals from an unauthorized location. Head coach Bill Belichick was fined a record $500,000 for this, among the team’s many punishments, and he promised never to do it again, a promise he may have kept until Spygate 2, when they were caught filming an opponent’s sideline during a 2019 game.

Impressive that they went 12 years without being caught breaking the same rule twice. Of course, they needed some of that time to come up with a plan for 2015’s “Deflategate,” during which the team and its quarterback Tom Brady were accused of intentionally deflating footballs to make them easier to grip.

The Patriots’ pattern of bending the rules began at least as long ago as the 1982 season, during which they played a game in Boston against the Miami Dolphins in blizzard conditions so miserable that neither team was able to score until late in the fourth quarter. Both teams had quit even trying to kick field goals after each of their kickers had been unable to get traction during previous attempts. But with less than five minutes to play, the Patriots brought out an actual convict on work release to drive a snow plow onto the field and clear some space for them to kick the game-winner.

The Dolphins went to the Super Bowl that year despite the 3-0 loss, and the league banned the use of snow plows in future games, but the Patriots’ style of play was established forever.

Until this season at least. Their new head coach Mike Vrabel is said to have cleaned up the Patriots’ reputation — a claim I’ll withhold judgement on at least until the end of this game.

Can the Seahawks’ superior offense and defense make the Super Bowl a blowout, or will the Patriots’ legendary pattern of dishonesty awake unexpectedly from its brief slumber to make this game a real contest?

No one knows for sure, but at least we can count on one thing: The halftime winner will be Bad Bunny over Kid Rock in a historic blowout.