From a survey on the psychology of scary stories:

With regard to age, there’s a suggestion that enjoyment rises through childhood, peaks in adolescence and then gradually fades with age. Related to this is the ‘snuggle theory’ – the idea that viewing horror films may be a rite of passage for young people, providing them with an opportunity to fulfil their traditional gender roles. A paper from the late 1980s by Dolf Zillmann, Norbert Mundorf and others found that male undergrads paired with a female partner (unbeknown to them, a research assistant), enjoyed a 14-minute clip from Friday the 13th Part III almost twice as much if she showed distress during the film. Female undergrads, by contrast, said they enjoyed the film more if their male companion appeared calm and unmoved. Moreover, men who were initially considered unattractive were later judged more appealing if they displayed courage during the film viewing. ‘Scary movies and monsters are just the ticket for girls to scream and hold on to a date for dear life and for the date (male or female) to be there to reassure, protect, defend and, if need be, destroy the monster,’ says Fischoff. ‘Both are playing gender roles prescribed by a culture.’

Happy Halloween.

In response to the presently on-going Bernard Herrmann series at Film Forum in New York honoring the composer's centennial, presented here is a selection of short soundtrack music cues by the composer, with brief observations, and information regarding their availability on CD, LP or other formats.

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Amen.

CHICAGO -- The emails come with increasing frequency, frustrated and sarcastic, quick to comment on the "geniuses" at work whenever the NBA owners and players meet for their latest round of collective bargaining negotiations. In the case of economist Kevin Murphy, though, no quote marks are needed.

Never mind the card-carrying variety -- Murphy, working with the NBA players union during this lockout, is a check-cashing genius. That's the very best kind, as bestowed by the MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" -- $500,000, no strings attached -- he received in 2005 for his research on "seeming intractable economic questions." Back in 1997, he received the John Bates Clark medal awarded to the most promising economist under the age of 40.

He is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, he's been commuting to the labor talks in New York and, with all due respect to NBA commissioner David Stern, union director Billy Hunter and the others hashing out the league's finances and future, he truly might be the smartest guy in the room.

"Kevin is far and away the smartest guy in the field," Freakonomics author and Chicago colleague Steven Levitt said in a 2006 profile of Murphy. "Not only is he widely regarded as the smartest economist on Earth, but he can also fix your refrigerator."

Murphy has analyzed the economics of health and medical research, of addictions and national drug policy and of inequality and labor markets. He was brought in to assist Microsoft during its antitrust battles with the Justice Department a decade ago. He and his former professor at UCLA, Ben Klein, worked with the NFL during the formulation of its Plan B free agency system. He teaches an advanced microeconomics class this term, is known to be a mean woodworker and is mired in his second go-round of NBA negotiations.

"A colleague of mine here, John Huizinga, was the agent for Yao Ming," said Murphy, a sturdy, non-tweedy type of academic known for his trademark ball cap (he reportedly wore one even when he testified before Congress). "I guess Billy asked him, well, do you know any economists who would be good to help. John recommended me. I talked to Billy and started working for them in '05."

Murphy spoke at length with NBA.com Tuesday evening from his office at the Gleacher Center, the school's downtown campus. By morning, he would be on a flight back to Manhattan for another small-group bargaining session -- the first since talks emotionally broke off last week -- in hopes of ending the nearly 4-month-old lockout.

"I was very pessimistic last week after the Thursday blow-up but I'm beginning to come around and think we've got a shot," Murphy said. "If there's a deal here, it's going to be a deal that nobody likes. That's what deals are. Nobody walks out feeling like they got a complete victory. That's initially. But then you get back to playing and you realize, geez, I can live with this."

Murphy is a transplanted Californian; in fact, he grew up so close to The Forum in Inglewood that he could see it from his house. Working his way through school at grocery stores, Murphy dazzled the economics faculty at UCLA, then enrolled in graduate school in Chicago in 1981. Thanks to geography, the eventual influence of his kids and hitting the Michael Jordan era just right, he shifted his allegiance from the Lakers to the Bulls.

The NBA has its own set of economists, who predictably and respectfully differ with some of Murphy's views on the current labor strife. But in terms of the quality of his advice -- and his role in shaping the union's give-and-take at the table -- NBA players could hardly do better than this superstar of supply-and-demand.

NBA.com: People are familiar with a lot of the names and faces in the negotiations -- David Stern, Billy Hunter, Derek Fisher -- but you're largely unknown to fans and the media. Tell us what you do in the room.

Kevin Murphy: My role is to try to really understand the various positions put forward by the sides and how they'll ultimately play out. You talk changes to the luxury tax system or changes to free agency, changes to just about anything, that all has pretty wide-ranging effects on length of contracts, guarantees, salaries, just about everything that matters to the players and to the owners. They're all interconnected, which makes it tough.

NBA.com: This is your second time dealing with NBA labor talks, right?

KM: I did this in '05 and tried to build predictions about what was going to happen based on the changes in that deal. Obviously the guys in the NBA office have more experience because they deal with it on a daily basis. They have a team of people who routinely forecast league finances and outcomes, administer the salary cap. I kind of come and go at negotiations.

NBA.com: Does each side's economist try to discredit the other's viewpoint?

KM: I don't think it pays to try to pull the wool over the other side's eyes. When it comes to economic analysis, I try to be as honest as I can with the people on the other side.

It doesn't do you any good to try to fool 'em. They're not dumb. You're not going to succeed and then they're not going to trust you.

NBA.com: Is economic analysis open to interpretation or do the numbers generate one "truth?"

KM: In certain cases, it's relatively straightforward. In cases like this, there's more room for disagreement. All those moving parts, people can put them together in different ways. Everybody has their own vested numbers, so everybody shapes their numbers in their own direction. If they think 'it' could be between 6 and 12 and 6 is good for them and 12 is good for us, they'll say 7. That's not like making stuff up, that's just saying, 'I'm going to be cautious.' I usually try to say, 'I can't tell you for sure, but it's going to be between 6 and 12.' What's the consequence if it's 6? What's the consequence if it's 12?

Sometimes I see things differently that maybe they haven't thought about. Hopefully that will help move the needle and help move their position a little bit. But my biggest role is to keep my side informed and tell them, 'If you agree to this, here's what's going to happen.'

NBA.com: Given the numbers that are out there now -- the owners offering 50 percent of basketball-related income (BRI), the players seeking 52.5 -- it seems like a small gap to close.

KM: Saying that and getting one are two different things. You can sit there and say, 'We're only X apart.' But the other guy can say, 'Well, it's only X, why don't you move?' And you say, 'It's only X, why don't you move?'

NBA.com: You can "cut the baby in half."

KM: Sometimes. But people will say, I already cut it in half to get to here. That's certainly our view of the world. We started from where we were. We didn't stretch our position in order to give it up. They started from what objectively -- I think they would agree -- was a massive change in the system and have "given" from there. But if you start 100 miles away and move 50 miles, you can still be outside the range of reasonable. Had they gotten their initial offer, that would have been the most one-sided deal in the history of sports negotiations -- by, I think, a fair stretch. It was an enormous ask on their part.

NBA.com: Many people understand that NBA players as a select group of specialized, highly skilled workers. Are there many many instances, though, in which labor commands more than 50 percent of an industry's costs?

KM: In certain sectors, there's a ton. You go to a law firm, most of its cost is labor. You've got to remember, labor is 60-something percent of the economy. In the service sector, it can be much higher than that. And these people really define the product. These are the ones people come to see.

What separates the NBA from a different basketball league? Well, it's the players. The basketball's' the same, the court's the same, it's the players who really are the distinguishing feature. That's not to say that the league doesn't have value. But the defining characteristic and the scarce resource, if you think about it from an economic point of view, is the talent. It's not unlike Hollywood, the music business or any of the other ones where the thing that distinguishes one person from another is the talent.

NBA.com: Why do you think it's more so in basketball than other sports?

KM: The difference between being an NBA Finals team and being an also-ran is a couple of guys -- maybe one guy. It's only five guys and you can give the same guy the ball every time you come down if you want to. ... And the players are very visible. It's more of a player-driven sport than [the others], and the advent of the Internet has made it even more so.

It's also changed the game in that people aren't as parochial as they used to be. At one time, people followed their team because they read the local paper and watched the local news. But now I can be a fan of the Lakers and live in ... Seattle. I've got all the Internet access, I've got NBA TV, I've got a zillion ways to be a fan long-distance.

NBA.com: That plays right into the structure issues the owners have. They want Milwaukee fans, for example, to not only root for the Bucks but to have most seasons with hope that their team can compete with bigger-revenue markets.

KM: There's an element of that. But also, be careful what you wish for. When you get a Sacramento-Charlotte NBA Finals, guys will be crying over the TV ratings. We know that even with baseball -- it's an exciting World Series but the ratings aren't there because it's the Texas Rangers and St. Louis [Cardinals]. Basketball is even more star-driven. You get to an NBA Finals that doesn't have one of the premier players in the league in it, it becomes a lot less interesting. And with 30 teams, not everybody is going to have one of the premier players.

NBA.com: There are fewer franchise players than there are franchises.

KM: For sure. Especially not created equal. You have a relatively small number of true franchise players. Then you have kind of wannabe franchise players. But there aren't 30 Kobe Bryants, LeBron James or Dwyane Wades -- wherever you want to draw the line, but there aren't 30 of them.

NBA.com: So do you buy the competitive balance concerns?

KM: You don't want a system where almost nobody has a chance. Then again, the optimal league doesn't look like a crap shoot at the beginning of the years. First of all, there is a lot more interest in some teams than others. The league has done very well that way. When the Bulls were great, that wasn't a bad league. When it was the Lakers and Boston ... there have been a number of years like that.

NBA.com: You grew up in Inglewood as a Lakers fan, spanning the time from Wilt Chamberlain and Jerry West to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Magic Johnson's arrival. In the 1970s, eight different franchises won the 10 titles.

KM: That was not the greatest time for the league. This complete egalitarian world is unlikely to be the best league.

NBA.com: One effect of equalizing payrolls is you incentivize good players to go where the money is available. But another might be paying good money to players who might not deserve it, just because more franchises have to spend on ... somebody.

KM: That's a problem. The other thing is, there is some relationship between pay and success but it's not nearly as strong as people think it is. Even if you were to completely equalize pay across teams, there still would be an enormous variation in strength of teams. In a statistical sense, the level of payroll of a team explains somewhere like 5 percent to 10 percent in the variation in outcomes.

NBA.com: That's all?

KM: That's it. I did a little experiment. All you have to do is take the overall distribution of win-loss percentages. Let them tell you what they think the relationship between salaries and wins is. They tell you 'This much spending is worth this many wins.' So then you take everybody's salary down to the mean or up to the mean. Then if you tell me you get an extra win for every $3 million you spend, I'm going to give everyone I'm moving up an extra win for each $3 million. Everybody I move down, I'm going to give one fewer win for each $3 million.

NBA.com: And?

KM: The relationship between salaries and the number of wins in a season is positive, but it's pretty weak. It certainly is not going to have a dramatic change in the distribution of outcomes. It might change who the winners are and who the losers are, but you're still going to have some teams that are much better than others. Because some people spend their money much more wisely than others do.

NBA.com: That's what the owners say they want: A chance for good management to make a difference.

KM: That's a different issue. The problem is, just about for every [owner] who spent a lot and they won a lot, so you're moving them closer to the average, there's some [owner] who spent a lot and didn't win a lot and you're moving them in the other direction.

NBA.com: Even at this late date, from interviews given by Hunter, Fisher and others on the players' side, there seems to be skepticism of the league's financial numbers, as if the audited figures aren't to be believed.

KM: I would say the primary disagreement is not over the accounting numbers. It's what you include and how you interpret the numbers. For example, the accounting picture of the NBA isn't very different from what it was five years ago or 10 years ago in terms of ratio of revenues to costs and all the rest -- it's changed very little. Which immediately tells you, wait a minute, if the underlying financial picture is similar today to what it was five years ago or 10 years ago, and people are paying $400 million or whatever for franchises, and you're telling me that these things lose money every year, something's missing, right? These people aren't stupid, right? These guys are worth billions of dollars. So why did they pay all this money for franchises that, it looks like, lose money?

Well, the answer is pretty clear. There are a couple of things that are really attractive. One is, historically, you've seen franchises appreciate in value and that appreciation has more than outstripped any cash-flow losses that you've had. And if you're in the right tax position, it's actually pretty good because you've got a tax loss annually on your operating and you've got a capital gain at the end that you accumulate untaxed until you sell it and then pay at a lower rate. So you get a deferred tax treatment on the gains and an immediate tax treatment on the losses, that's not a bad deal.

Let's say the NBA is a $4 billion revenue business -- that's not exactly right but it's close enough. Then let's say you lose $200 million. That's 5 percent. OK, my franchises are worth -- let's make it simple, 2½ times revenue, which is well below Forbes [valuations] -- that's $10 billion. Now let's say it's appreciating at 4 percent a year. I'm getting $400 million in appreciation even though I only have $200 million in losses. I'm getting better tax treatment on the $400 million that I'm making, and I deduct at a higher rate the $200 million that I'm losing. Suddenly this picture doesn't look so crazy any more.

Secondly, it's a lot of fun to own an NBA franchise...

NBA.com: The "psychic benefits" Malcolm Gladwell touts.

KM: The psychic benefits are not trivial. Third, there are benefits outside basketball. Like who got a casino? Who got a land deal? Who got real estate? You start looking around, you say, 'There's a lot of benefits to being an NBA owner." You put all those pieces together, it explains why those people spent all that money for those franchises.

What I keep coming back to as an economist is, "Look, you tell me this is a lousy investment. The No. 1 way to tell if something's a lousy investment, it ain't worth anything." There are a lot of firms that are losing money and are going to go bankrupt, look at what their stock is worth -- it's not worth nothin'. But when you tell me these things aren't worth a lot of money and they don't make money, you immediately hold onto your wallet. You say, "There's a disconnect here. Smart guys, a lot of money -- well, why are you buying it? Why are you buying something that loses money every year?"

NBA.com: The owners will say there's been a franchise bubble not unlike the housing bubble. A number of them bought high and don't think they'll see the equity growth.

KM: The fact is, guys have not done well over the last few years as asset prices generally have gone down. I don't doubt that. But to say that you lost money in the worst asset crash in memory -- and franchises haven't gone down nearly as much as many assets have gone down -- that's not telling you you need concessions going forward.

If you go back before the last 3-5 years, these guys did incredibly well. Their franchises weren't going up by 4 or 5 percent, they were going up by 8 or 9 percent a year. They were making money hand over fist. Should [the players] get credit for that? Should we get that money back? Now those are different people in some cases. They need to go get their money from the guys they bought the franchises from. That's the guy who has all your money. Not us.

But who bought anything in '07 that they're happy with the price they paid? If you bought a house in '07, if you bought stocks in '07, if you bought bonds in '07 -- I don't care what you bought, you're not happy with the price you paid. When you buy at the top, you don't make your money. That's not unique to the NBA, that's everywhere in life. But by and large, NBA franchise ownership has been a good investment. You can't base long-run projections on how you did in the biggest financial downturn of the last 50 years. On that basis, there are no good investments out there. But we know that's not true.

NBA.com: Management cites rising costs in marketing, ticket sales and other areas.

KM: Ask them to show you how much their costs have gone up as a percentage of BRI. Our moving from 57 to 52.5 covers more than 100 percent of any cost increase they've had.

NBA.com: How does it make sense economically to hold out for a small percentage that's much less, in sheer dollars, than what the players are losing by missing games? A gap of 2.5 percent is worth $100 million annually, but a missed month of paychecks is $400 million.

KM: Part of it on our side is an investment in the future. If you give up a lot today, you're not just giving it up today, you start the next contract from that much lower. So you're talking about the long-term impact of that kind of concession.

You can say the same thing for the owners. They're losing money every week. The answer is, both sides are losing in this. It's a shame we can't get a deal. But I'm not going to make it sound easier than it is. It's always easy to say, "Well, one of you guys should give in." But tell me who? And when someone says, 'Just compromise,' at least recently, that hasn't been happening. Maybe it will.

NBA.com: Some cynics think the owners wanted to get to this point to squeeze the players via lost paychecks.

KM: I think there's an element of that, a desire to see how far they could push the players to see when the players would crumble. Given that there was not a great cost ... it's almost too bad that it isn't more costly to lose the start of the season. If it had been, they wouldn't have done it. The idea that I can get this, like, almost-free test of the other side's resolve is tempting, right?

NBA.com: So maybe they need to set the expiration date of the CBA right before the playoffs to raise the stakes.

KM: That would make a difference. That's the old increase-the-cost way to get a deal. That's true of negotiations in general. It takes the threat of fire to get people to move.

NBA.com: When do the rosy growth projections of 4 percent used by both sides take a hit from fans' backlash to this lockout?

KM: If we get a deal here soon, I think the long-term consequences will be minimal. The longer it goes, the more substantial the risk. I think everybody's taken a hit to some extent. It might not show up in the financial numbers right away, but I don't think this has been good for either side. Both sides have looked not so good at times, comical at other times.

I've tried to stay out of it. This is the first interview I've done. I don't think it does any good to throw crap around, spin everything that comes out -- and there's been a lot of that going on. It wears thin on me, I'm sure it wears thin on fans too.

NBA.com: Leverage plays a role in economics?

KM: Absolutely. It ultimately is the determinant of what deal you're going to get. Call it what it is. Neither side wants to take a bad deal from its perspective, which makes it tough. Both sides have this mixed constituency, who aren't all on the same page, which makes it doubly hard. It's a shame. I feel bad for the fans, I feel bad for the people who are waiting.

Hopefully we'll be able to get in a room, reach across the table and shake each other enough to get us to a deal.

NBA.com: Where do you see this landing?

KM: Ultimately what it comes down to is, you get what you can negotiate. It's not what you deserve, what's "right," that ends up carrying the day. But then they ought to be straight up. They ought to say, "We've got the ability to negotiate. We'll hold your feet to the fire and get what we can."

The one thing I don't want to see happen: I don't want to see any lingering bad blood between the two sides. That's not good either. You run the risk that, if it gets too personal, that creates its own set of frictions going forward. I think people on both sides are cognizant of that.

Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA for 25 years. You can e-mail him here and follow him on twitter.

The views on this page do not necessarily reflect the views of the NBA, its clubs or Turner Broadcasting.

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Seriously! Vote for this pumpkin at www.duarte.com/halloween!

Ladies and gentlemen,

Right from the start I want to let you know how this is going to end: You will vote for this pumpkin.

You will vote for this pumpkin not because it’s the easy thing to do, but because it’s the right thing to do. You will vote for this pumpkin not because it needs your support, but because acknowledging this pumpkin’s greatness will bring clarity and meaning to your otherwise dull life.

The case for this pumpkin is obvious. Just consider the facts:

1. Utilizing her patent-pending Dual Gourd Construction®, architect Paula Tesch crafted this magnificently twee fox out of A FUCKING PUMPKIN! Do you know how hard it is to turn a pumpkin into something valuable? It’s like trying to play racquetball with a motorcycle helmet. Do you know what the second-best use for a pumpkin is, after a fancy jack-o-lantern? It’s for goddamn soccer practice for stupid teenage kids. Pumpkins are awful! This was hard.


2. Your vote for this pumpkin isn’t an exclusive endorsement, so you can go “Like” other ones as well! Therefore, this vote is less a test of your values than a celebration of something that’s just fun! Don’t be a buzzkill.


3. I mean, just look at it! Is that real fur on the ears and a gourd seed as a tooth?! Hot damn! I don’t know about you, but with all that’s messed up in this crazy world, this is something I can support with a clear conscience!


4. It was made by Paula, who Pick-up Hugs Magazine recently named one of the world’s five most amazing people under five feet tall! And that’s a particularly tough category to compete in because you’re mainly pitted against adorable children!
   
   Let me tell you one quick story about how great Paula is so you understand what you’re supporting here: While recently waiting in line at Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Paula encountered an elderly woman who was terribly confused and desperately in search of some pie. Now, not only did Paula take time out of her day to help comfort this person in a time of need, but she also baked her a pie on the spot and then teleported this woman back to her oldest daughter’s house so she could have a surprise visit with her grandchildren! That’s the type of person you’re supporting by voting for this pumpkin — and I’ll be damned if you’re going to just sit by idly, twiddling your thumbs, implicitly casting a vote against an elderly woman’s right to surprise her grandchildren.

In conclusion, A) This pumpkin-sculpture is incredible, B) Paula is wonderful, smart, beautiful, funny, and deserving of your support, C) I am biased in her favor but I don’t care, and D) You will vote for this pumpkin.

Thank you, and God bless America.

As some many know, last year The Simpsons show had Bansky conceptualize a version of their "couch gag" routine, a small place in the show's opening credits that allowed for variation at the end of a structured narrative—the arrival of the family from their days at work, school, detention and shopping to sit down and, in a reveal that never really seems commented upon, apparently watch a show about themselves.  While much of The Simpsons has grown stale over the years, its writers admirably continue to take advantage of their unusual corporate freedom to brutally mock their parent company, 20th Century Fox / News Corps, and Bansky's caricaturization of the Korean forced labor required to make an episode of the show is without a doubt the most literal and brutal capitalist satires the show has employed.  Watch that opening here.

The producers have now commissioned another artist to riff off their couch gag—cartoonist John Kricfalusi (John K.), best known for creating Ren & Stimpy for Nickelodeon.  One might think that the move from a pseudonymous  political graffiti arist to a cartoon animator might be another milestone in the show's inertia-like slide into out-of-touch conservativeness, but the result is actually very startling.  As Amid remarks in his interview (highly recommended) with cartoonist Kricfalusi over at Cartoon Brew,

"John’s opening is, in fact, far more subversive because he focuses almost exclusively on making a pictorial statement, relegating the show’s dominant literary elements to the back seat. In 35 short and sweet seconds, he liberates the animation of The Simpsons from years of graphic banality. The visual look of the show, which has been so carefully controlled by its producers, becomes a giddy and unrestrained playground for graphic play, and the balance of creative authority is shifted from the writers’ room to the animators in one fell swoop."

I am reminded, not coincidentally, of the canonical visual appreciation thread on The Simpsons created on the video games forum NeoGaf, a lengthy and insane must-read for fans of the show: "We post screens that showcase the visual charisma lost by modern Simpsons."

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H/T: Tango.

Abstract

The long lasting debate initiated by Gilovich, Vallone and Tversky in is revisited: does a “hot hand” phenomenon exist in sports? Hereby we come back to one of the cases analyzed by the original study, but with a much larger data set: all free throws taken during five regular seasons () of the National Basketball Association (NBA). Evidence supporting the existence of the “hot hand” phenomenon is provided. However, while statistical traces of this phenomenon are observed in the data, an open question still remains: are these non random patterns a result of “success breeds success” and “failure breeds failure” mechanisms or simply “better” and “worse” periods? Although free throws data is not adequate to answer this question in a definite way, we speculate based on it, that the latter is the dominant cause behind the appearance of the “hot hand” phenomenon in the data.

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Given the litany of regrettable opinions about the Internet held by some of my favorite dramatists, the following description makes me a little bit queasy:

"The movie I’m about to do has got a lot of scenes and a lot of characters. And the scope of it and the world it inhabits is very, very large. In the broadest possible sense, it’s about online film criticism, but as usual, the world that I’m writing about is not necessarily the world that I’m writing about. It’s just a place to set it. There’s a lot in there about the internet and anger: cultural, societal and individual anger. And isolation in this particular age we live in. And competition: it’s about the idea of people in this world wanting to be seen. I hate to use the word “about”, as it implies that what I’m doing is an analogy and that I’m trying to say something. I’m not. That’s for the audience to do.’"

harris savides rides his bike

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Per Eno: Holy shit. I can only imagine how great I'll find this once I figure out a practical use for it...

Search by Drawing

Draw an interesting curve, then click 'Correlate!' to find query terms whose popularity over time matches the shape you drew.

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#want

This superb poster for Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye—one of my very favorite films—was illustrated by the great Richard Amsel (1947-1985). Amsel was a prodigy whose career hit the ground running when, aged 22 and still a student at the Philadelphia College of Art, he won a nationwide contest sponsored by 20th Century Fox to design a poster for Hello Dolly. For the next 15 years, until his untimely AIDS-related death at the age of 37, Amsel illustrated some of the best loved posters of the '70s and early '80s, including, most famously, those for The Sting and Raiders of the Lost Ark. His poster for The Long Goodbye is one of his more elegantly spare designs, conveying Elliott Gould's rumpled, tough guy charm as Philip Marlowe, as well as a hint of mystery in Nina Van Pallandt's robed figure in the doorway. Just the elements one would need to sell Altman's offbeat update of Raymond Chandler.

When the film premiered in 1973 at a weekend retrospective of Chandler movies in Tarrytown, New York, it was not well received. Altman was present for a Q&A and sensed a hostile response to the film. It opened to lackluster reviews and disappointing grosses in L.A. (where it played Grauman's Chinese), Chicago, Philadelphia and Miami and was promptly pulled from distribution before its New York opening. The rumors were that it was going to be re-edited, if not shelved, but instead United Artists analyzed the reception the film had received and decided that the fault lay with the misleading ad campaign for the film that made it look like a straightforward detective story. So the studio spent $40,000 on a new campaign designed by Mad magazine artist Jack Davis, (b. 1924), whose cartoon illustrations had already enlivened It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and Woody Allen's Bananas. Davis's poster, seen below, reimagines the film as a wacky free-for-all with Altman as ringmaster. Elliott Gould still has a cat on his shoulder, but no revolver in his belt, and you only have to look at the difference between Van Pallandt's dogs in each poster—one sleek and aristocratic, the other mangy and feral—to see how these posters are worlds apart. Altman's speech bubble ("Hi! I'm high-powered director Robert Altman") pre-empts criticism that this is not your father's Philip Marlowe (something the Tarrytown audience hadn't been prepared for) by declaiming "This film is full of fun—murder, maiming, drunkenness, infidelity, topless yoga freaks, four-letter words—everything!" (click on the poster to read more).

The film was finally released in New York six months after the original opening and got a new lease of life, ending up on the New York Times' Ten Best list. In Mitchell Zuckoff's recent oral biography of Altman, David Picker, the head of United Artists at the time, who had championed both Gould and Altman for the film (though Peter Bogdanovich was actually his first choice to direct) says "I found [Altman's] conduct in relation to us at United Artists and toward me personally incomprehensible. He took credit for something that we did. We're talking about the entire way the picture was released. I liked that picture a lot and I didn't like the way our marketing people initially distributed it. I pulled it out of release and did a whole new marketing campaign, and Altman took credit for it. He didn't have the grace to give us credit for it, and I told him to go fuck himself."

Meanwhile the studio, or at least its international marketing department, must have decided that audiences overseas would accept the film as a more straightforward private-eye thriller, hence the international release poster below, artist unknown.

There is also a second Richard Amsel illustration for the film (Amsel's trademark signature is not on the poster, but Amsel fan and archivist Adam McDaniel credits it to him):

And Amsel's original design appeared on the film's lobby cards:

Jack Davis never did another Altman poster, despite the success of his Long Goodbye campaign, while Amsel, whose had earlier created the amazing poster for Altman's 1971 masterpiece McCabe & Mrs. Miller (another film that got a campaign reboot after its title was changed) by painting directly onto a piece of wood...

...went on to draw this unused illustration for Altman's Nashville in 1975. (The studio again decided to go with something wackier).

Amsel did however get another chance at a Philip Marlowe poster (and producer Elliott Kastner finally got to cast Robert Mitchum—his initial choice for The Long Goodbye—as Marlowe) with the Michael Winner directed 1978 remake of The Big Sleep.

You can catch some of John Williams' theme song to The Long Goodbye in the Notebook's first Soundtrack Mix. Thanks to Bob Hunter for the Zuckoff book, and Nadja Tennstedt who inspired this post with her shared love of Elliott Gould (who turned 73 earlier this week).

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I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

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Truth in advertising: A master class.

Back in the spring, we interviewed a dozen of TV's top showrunners for New York Magazine's television issue, and when we asked them all what show made them want to get into television, the majority cited Cheers. But the one who seemed the most passionate about the NBC comedy, which lasted eleven remarkable seasons (1982–1993), was Michael Schur, co-creator of Parks and Recreation and former showrunner of The Office. He spoke of it in the kind of loving terms usually reserved for one's parents, and the influence of the bar comedy shows through in Parks and Rec, which shares Cheers' sweet sensibility and surrogate-family characters. As we wallow in TV's dead zone, with only a few quality shows dotting the cable dial as we wait for the fall season to begin, we decided to have Schur provide an extensive master class on one of television's all-time great comedies, dissecting exactly what made it work and how it shaped him as a writer. Read on and suddenly you'll be racing to Netflix to plow through all eleven seasons before fall, but be warned: Extensive exposure to the comedy will only make you judge the networks' upcoming new comedies all the more harshly.

What special place does Cheers hold in your heart?
To me it’s the best sitcom ever made. Whenever I’m asked that question I always answer Cheers.

Without hesitation?
Yeah, I’ve always felt that way. I felt that way when I was a kid and I was watching it every week, and I felt that way as new TV shows emerged. There’s a case to be made for the British Office, in terms of it being revolutionary, but that’s more like a mini-series. Cheers did almost 300 episodes over eleven years. The thing that made it so great is it has a giant cast of incredibly great characters and they would get immense mileage out of just having them talk to each other. It wasn’t fancy or tricky, they didn’t have crazy plot moves. You just watched these amazing characters slowly change and evolve over eleven years. You watch these episodes and there are like four scenes sometimes in an entire episode. They’re in the bar and this happens and that happens and you go to commercial, then you come back and they’re still in the bar and they talk to each other and you’re just following this delightful story of these people in this place. And their scenes were so wonderful. The idea that … it’s literally in the theme song: It’s a place where everyone knows your name, it’s a place where you can go when you’re sad, when you’re happy, when you just need to talk to somebody.

When I wrote at SNL I had this feeling sometimes that the difference between a good comedy sketch and a truly great comedy sketch is the truly great comedy sketch knocks out a thousand other ideas. I would come up with other sketch ideas and think, "Oh, that’s really funny" and then I’d go, "I’m just doing 'Happy Fun Ball' again." You know a sketch is truly amazing is when you keep thinking that you’re on to something and you realized that it’s been done in this better version. The McLaughlin Group, Wayne’s World, Happy Fun Ball … There are certain things that just cut a very wide swath through the idea of sketches, and to me Cheers kind of cut that same swath through the idea of sitcoms because they just had these themes and characters and relationships that are just so archetypal and so great that, later in life, I would often find myself [writing something and thinking] "This is sort of like what Frasier and Woody were like," and then I’ll think, "Well, too bad. It’s great and I’m going to do it anyway."

The show deals with a group of people who all spend their entire lives together, both at work and after. That wasn’t a new concept: The Mary Tyler Moore Show was essentially the same thing, for one. What made this show different?
I think one of the great aspects of Cheers is that it wasn’t revolutionary at all. I personally think the best ideas for TV shows — at least comedies — are very low-fi ideas. High concepts often sell pitches in movies and TV, but, especially in TV when you’re talking about hopefully a 100- or 150-episode proposition, those concepts just burn off and then you're stuck with nothing. The best shows are always the ones that are very, very low-concept and just about great characters. It’s a very famous story — and it’s true of Seinfeld and Friends and Cheers and a bunch of other great shows that are low-concept — they always start slow. Same with the American Office; at first people are like, "Mahh, I don’t like it, there’s nothing going on." But it’s because there’s no big hook-y thing. It’s not "this guy has the ability to read people’s minds" or something. [Those kind of concepts] make a good pilot, but what makes a good series is just characters and relationships that take a while to explain and grow. And to me, Cheers is the best possible example of that. There’s nothing at the beginning of the series that’s hook-y or grabby or bright and shiny that would make a good pitch in a room. It’s just a place, a setting where a bunch of really great characters and great actors and great writers had a little laboratory.

A lot of times I’ll be watching a sitcom and reacting scientifically, like thinking, Oh, that's a funny line, but it doesn't actually make me laugh. Or with others, I really like the cast, but I wish the writing was better. It's so rare to find one that works on all levels. What does it take to make a show that makes people want to come back again and again, like Cheers?
I think it’s the chemistry and the mixture of the writing and the performance, certainly. At the very least you can write the best show in the world and put it into the hands of a mediocre actor and you will get no response, and you can take a terrible joke and put it in the hands of a great actor and get a pretty good response, but it’s the combination of the writers knowing the actors and the characters so well that they know exactly where the sweet spot is on a moment-by-moment basis. And in a writers room you can almost hear a click in your ear when you get it right. When someone pitches a joke for a character that is just perfect and you can imagine that actor reading that line at your table read or on the set, it’s like the sound of a snap snapping into place. I think Cheers had the best, funniest writing on TV at the time it was on. I think it was a perfect concept for a show, but you have Sam Malone played by someone who’s 10 percent worse than Ten Danson and have Diane Chambers played by someone 10 percent worse than Shelley Long and on down the line and you get, "Oh, I like that show" and you watch it once in a while, but it certainly doesn't hold the legendary place in time like it does currently.

I see glimmers of Cheers in Parks and Recreation in the idea that there's this insular group of people who never hang out with anyone else but their co-workers and a circle of immediate friends. Do you feel like there’s a lot of Cheers in your show?
I don’t know if that part is true of our show. Because they work in the government, we really try to have our characters interact with the public and they do a lot of public forums, and the government is big and there’s media outlets that they interact with. I don’t think our show is like Cheers in that sense, I think it’s like Cheers in the sense that the humor is, generally speaking, very positive and good-natured. Yes, there was a fair amount of Carla almost never saying something that wasn’t an insult, and they certainly picked on each other a fair amount, but the themes of the show were really about community and friendship and support of each other. [I picked four episodes to rewatch at random] and it was really shocking — the themes of the show are present in every single one, I mean explicitly present. There were moments when the characters literally give voice to the idea that this is their family. In season five's Thanksgiving episode [with the famous food fight], Frasier literally says family is not necessarily limited to blood relations. That’s the theme of the show: You have another family. I think that’s the theme of a lot of workplace shows; you want to believe these people really care about each other and that they are a surrogate family. I think Cheers did it the best of anybody.

You said earlier that Cheers wasn't revolutionary, but do you feel like it spawned any sitcom archetypes?
Yes and no. Again, I think they were building off what came before them. It wasn’t like when Seinfeld came out and they had that rule on that show, "no hugging, no learning." And then a bunch of people tried to imitate that show with the same kind of cynical inside-out mockery of network sitcoms and what makes them work. But you don’t have Michael Richards, Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. If you don’t have that cast, you don’t make that show work. Sometimes there are shows that come out and people take the wrong lessons from them; the only lesson they should’ve taken from Seinfeld is that’s a one-in-a-million genius cast and a one-in-a-million showrunner and just don’t try to imitate that at all. But Cheers was just building off the ideas of past sitcoms, which was to find a place where people come together and show them interacting and follow their lives and develop good scenes. It would be interesting to try to do a real forensic look at how much Cheers specifically influenced the next generation of shows. I think it’s fairly significant in a subtle way in the sense that there are lessons to be taken from Cheers as a person who’s creating shows, in terms of the way the relationships develop and the way that characters change. But I don’t think it's as direct as how Friends was a show about six people who lived across from each other in an apartment [and] so let’s just try to do the same thing.

Sam and Diane did seem like the Patient Zero for the will-they-won’t-they setup.
Oh, that aspect yes, you’re absolutely right, I’m completely ignoring that aspect. To this day, people will say to you, "What's the Sam and Diane?" and certainly on The Office Jim and Pam were our Sam and Diane. It’s not that that didn’t exist before Cheers and it’s not that that won’t exist for a long time after Cheers, but that idea of a central relationship [is now a staple]. There’s a reason that the Cheers finale was about Diane coming back. That was the central thing that happened in the show, their opposites-attract relationship that had its ups and downs.

The Sam and Diane relationship was so intrinsic to the show, them getting together, breaking up, him proposing, her saying no, her wanting him back … but you look back and think, That couple didn’t make any sense at all. It almost doesn’t seem logical.
To me, every part of it works. The beginning of it works, all the crazy parts in the middle work. It’s also the writing and the beautiful idea that a washed-up former alcoholic ballplayer of limited intelligence and a perennial Ph.D. candidate can fall in love with each other. There’s something incredibly romantic about the basic idea of it; that there are people out there who are completely unlike you with whom you have incredible intense emotional roller-coaster rides, and I think that’s very relatable to people. I think everyone at one time or another has been completely in love with someone who’s totally wrong for them, but they’re just following their hearts. Both of those characters were completely lacking in a major aspect of personal growth and the other person was kind of helping them in that. It’s a better formula than having two pleasant, good-looking people get together. There’s no conflict there; nothing interesting going on. There will never be a better “opposites attract” TV romance, I think, than Sam and Diane.

When you were first starting Parks and Rec, was the idea that Leslie and Mark would be your Sam and Diane?
We weren’t 100 percent sure. We did a thing with those characters where they had a backstory. [Amy Poehler's Leslie had a lingering crush on Paul Schneider's since-departed Mark Brendanawicz, with whom she'd had a one-night stand six years earlier.] It’s very standard in pilots, and in Cheers as well, where you have someone opening a door for the first time [like when Diane first enters the bar and meets Sam]. We didn’t want to do that because we felt that you’ve seen it before. We thought it would be more interesting if you have this six-year-old backstory that’s more important for one character than for the other. We’d always imagined Mark as the kind of the guy who would float in and out of the world, because the real people he’s based on do that: You work for the government for a while, then you leave and come back and work for the private sector, so there would ideally be a nine-year-long on-again-off-again thing with them. The show sort of evolved in a different way, but certainly like the Cheers legacy, [we thought] you have to have some kind of central romance where there’s tension. On TV, if the love story’s successful, they end up being epic love stories because then they develop over years. That’s why Sam and Diane are perfect, because you couldn’t have started two characters at the more opposite end of the spectrum. She was running off to Barbados with her professor, and he’s a barfly, hanging around in a bar, waiting for women to fall into his trap. So they started them at the far ends of the spectrum in terms of what people are looking for romantically and then they brilliantly brought them together and tore them apart, and on and on it went.

Is there a limit to how long you can drag out a will-they-won't-they? Shelley Long left after five seasons, but if she hadn't, would an audience have gotten tired of the construct? Like, either stay married or don’t; I don’t want to go on this roller coaster with you anymore! When Kirstie Alley took over in season six, Sam hit on Rebecca, but in a no-shot kind of way; it was as if the writers didn't want to take on another romantic arc.
I think Shelley Long's leaving was secretly the best thing that could’ve happened to that show. It was a central romance and they burned through an incredible amount of story moves. There were times they were dating, there were times they were broken up. There were times where they were about to get married, and she was like, stop the wedding. It was very valuable. Kirstie Alley was great, and I always loved her. But it started this new arc for Sam, where he had to start to confront who he was. He wasn’t 31 anymore and wasn’t a ladies’ man, and maybe there’s something else in life worth searching for. And they got a lot of mileage out of that, and subsequently got a lot of mileage out of Sam and Rebecca's on-again-off-again flirtation or weird plans to have a child together. There’s a phrase that we use on our show that Greg Daniels taught me on The Office, which is “slicing the baloney as thin as possible." It means if you have a good arc for a character, if you cut off too much at one time, you’re going to burn through it too quickly. And at the same time, you need to give enough to keep people satisfied and interested. They were really good at parsing out Diane and the character growth in a way that remained interesting, but also kept the characters moving forward, but also had you watching them grow and change. It just was a masterful job.

Another sitcom archetype that I wonder if they started was the idea of the never-seen character, with Norm's wife Vera. There was Carlton the Doorman on Rhoda, but you always heard his voice. And that begat Niles's wife Maris on Frasier.
Well, Home Improvement did that as well. I remember very clearly getting ready for the finale and I was 150 percent sure we were going to meet Vera. And I’m really glad they didn’t because one of my favorite moments in the finale is [at the very end, when the core group is sitting around after closing time] and the phone rings and they all say, "It's Lilith, Vera, my kids ... " and Frasier says "just let it ring, let them think we’re on our way" and they all get up to go. They also have these moments where they go their separate ways and live their own lives. It’s like they have two families, and this was a neat little moment where the outside world is intruding on our world. They did such a good job establishing this place at the bar where they spend all this time, and in certain ways, all the characters need it as a place to be. [Vera served as a] genuine reminder that there’s a life that exists outside the camera. If they didn’t have that, it would be The Iceman Cometh and it would be incredibly depressing: These awful fat alcoholics who didn’t leave the stupid bar, but they did a great job reminding you that these people have lives outside of the bar.

I remember getting all prepared for the finale when it first aired and being underwhelmed. But when I just watched it again, I was much more moved by it. All of those jokes were so perfectly character-based, and a reminder that they were about to stop saying these jokes forever. I found myself laughing and getting a little teary when …
I know just the joke.

It's just Norm and Sam in the bar, and Sam says that Norm should go home and wake up Vera and give her a big kiss and "do what comes naturally." And Norm says, "Wake her up so she can watch me eat a bucket of buffalo wings?"
[Laughs.] That’s actually not the one I thought you were going to say. I was thinking of the one where Norm says, "You know what I think is the most important thing in life? Love. And you know what I love, Sam?" And Sam says, "Beer, Norm?" And Norm goes, "Yeah, I’ll have a quick one," and he goes and sits down. It’s like there was never a moment when Norm wasn’t going to have a beer and after eleven years it was a joy to see that even in that moment, in the middle of a very earnest discussion about the meaning of life and what’s important, he’s not going to turn down a beer and will assume at the slightest provocation that someone is offering him one.

When rewatching these episodes, do you think all the characters held up?
They all hold up for me, and I have my favorites certainly. One thing that struck me right off the bat is how completely and utterly Ted Danson owns Sam Malone from the first seconds of the pilot. The pilot begins with him walking down that hallway past the bathroom that led back to the pool table and he just has this incredible ease about him and this charm and this swagger. He swings his hips around a chair that’s kind of sticking out from a table and he runs his hands kind of lovingly across the railing that leads back to the hallway and he just loves the bar. And that’s how the series ends; Norm says, "I knew you were going to come back 'cause you can never leave your one true love." And Sam says, "Well, what is that?" and Norm says, "Think about it." And then you’re left alone with Sam at the bar trying to figure it out and he suddenly realizes that Norm is talking about the actual bar. And that scene and that idea is present in the first seconds of the pilot, which is so impressive to me.

The cold open of the pilot is him talking to a 16-year-old kid who's trying to buy a beer and he has a fake I.D. that says he was old enough to fight in Vietnam. Sam says, "What was that like?" And the kids says, "Gross." And Sam says, "Well, that’s what they say: War is gross." He’s just so smooth and he’s so kind and he says, "Sorry, soldier" and slides the I.D. back to him. He’s just so good-hearted and positive and endlessly confident in all matters and it was remarkable to me, because if you go back and look at the first two episodes of any show, the main characters are going to be different from the way that they ended up at the end of the series. Homer sounds completely different in the first half-dozen episodes of The Simpsons and Megan Mullaly’s character Karen on Will and Grace didn’t figure out her voice until a few episodes in and it’s true of Tina Fey in 30 Rock and Amy on our show. You’re growing into the character and the writers are trying to figure out how to write it. But from the first second of the Cheers pilot Ted Danson is Sam Malone. He knows the character inside and out; he’s completely fluent in the character. That really blew me away.

It’s interesting to see how Sam gradually changed over the run, as he seemed less effective as an aging Lothario. There was a little Vinnie Barbarino in him at the end; he was attractive but kind of dumb and people would be in awe of him but just as often make fun of him.
He aged. Let me clarify: I don’t mean that nothing happened as a character over the eleven years. Obviously the character got eleven years older and he went through significant life changes in terms of romance and his feelings about his role in the world and all that sort of stuff. I just mean that Ted Danson was incredibly fluent in Sam as a character from the very beginning. He knew how to play him, he knew where the jokes were, he knew how to deliver them, he knew how to be physically, he knew when to kind of swagger and when to disappear and fade into the background. He was great at physical comedy. It’s a very rare thing. There were certainly times when he was more of an airhead while he's pretty funny, sharp, and cynical in the pilot. And I think they found over the course of the first couple years that, mostly because of Diane, that it was a little bit funnier to drag him more towards the airhead part. But they managed to do that in a way that it didn’t conflict with Coach or Woody, which is in its own way impressive. Sam's lack of intelligence is really extreme vanity, which obviously wasn’t Coach or Woody’s problem, but wherever way they took the character he was so instantly on top of it and knew exactly how to do it.

You said you had your favorite characters. Who were they?
Well, my favorites while the show were Sam, Coach, Woody, and Cliff. The same is kind of proven true in rewatching some of these episodes. I have a new appreciation for Frasier because when I was a kid watching the show and he would make a reference to George Sand or something I would have no idea what he was talking about. Having been to high school and college I now have a new appreciation for him. It really is an amazing performance from Kelsey Grammer, that’s one of the all-time great characters on TV. But I loved Sam because I thought he was so funny and because he was so handsome and just confident and he played for the Red Sox so that certainly helped. I loved Cliff because he was a nerd and into trivia and I was a nerd who was into trivia. I loved Coach and Woody because Coach and Woody are very stupid and stupid is the nuclear weapon of comedy. In terms of pure belly laughs, nothing will ever beat stupid people.

You've filled the dumb guy slot in your shows.
On The Office it was sort of half Michael and half Creed. Creed’s all crazy and stupid but Michael’s really the moron, and on Parks and Rec it’s Andy. You know pretty much every comedy show has one character whose primary character trait is stupidity, and they always are really funny.

When I drove cross-country with a friend in 1991 we got into a huge argument in the upper northwest over whether the Diane years or Rebecca years were better. It started as a joking argument and then we really got angry about it in an unhealthy way. Which side are you on?
Are you talking which character do I prefer or are you talking about the actual show during their years? There are a lot of other factors, because it’s coincidence instead of causality in many cases. In general, I think the Diane years are better, but that’s not just because of Sam and Diane, it’s because the characters were new and fresh and exciting and they did all these great stories and established a lot of things that paid off down the line. And they made one of the most brilliant producing decisions in history; they had to replace Coach [in season four after Nicholas Colasanto died] and magically found [Woody Harrelson], a guy who was just as funny and who was almost exactly the same — it’s truly a miracle that happened. But in the Rebecca years you also get a lot of Lilith, and Lilith was amazing, so there are all these ancillary aspects of the show that weren’t necessarily just "Diane" or "Rebecca." But I think I very gently prefer the original, first five years or whatever it was. What did you say?

I came in on the Rebecca side because I think at that point the characters were so well worn in but not worn down. When I think about the season-nine episode "I'm Getting My Act Together and Sticking It In Your Face," where Rebecca is despondent right after she backs out of her wedding to Robin, it had a whole subplot of Frasier reading Charles Dickens to the barflies and injecting action scenes with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to keep them interested. They could throw on these odd things that work because you knew these guys so well.
It’s amazing that that was season nine, episode sixteen. Think about how many episodes they had done of that show and that B story or C story is so funny because you get the benefit of those years and years of character development. It’s amazing that this show replaced two main characters including the main love interests and managed to not only hang on but really flourish and grow.

Near the end of the run they experimented with Rebecca and Frasier being an item, but it only lasted a handful of episodes. Is it always a temptation in a long-running show to keep pairing all the characters off in different permutations to keep things fresh?
Yeah, it’s not only temptation, sometimes it’s a necessity. You get in season ten of a show and you need the ideas, conflicts, and scenarios that can lead to episode generation. It’s something that will be inevitable if you are doing a show that isn’t about a family. I don’t think Friends could have gone on for one more year because there were no more combinations. Monica and Chandler were married. Ross and Rachel were Ross and Rachel, Joey and Phoebe weren’t going to get together, but they tried Joey and Rachel. If there is one Über-category that people care about and like to follow and like to root for on TV it's romances, so when you're in season ten and you have two main characters who are single and eligible you are going to try it. It might not work and it might only be for a handful of episodes, but you’re going to give it a shot and see if there's anything there.

The other thing about Cheers is it seemed to avoid topical jokes. In the Thanksgiving show Cliff makes a reference to Hands Across America, and it was very jarring. Except for Sam’s high-waisted jeans or a run of loud sweaters, there's not a lot that dates the show, as compared to shows that thrive on topical references such as 30 Rock and Family Guy. Do you consciously avoid jumping on topical subjects that sets your show in a certain time?
We have a couple rules on the show. If possible we never show the year; like, if there’s a banner for some event we never show "Harvest Festival 201" or something. Because we feel like visually that would be bad; we want people ideally to be watching these shows long into the future and you don’t want to date yourself. But on my show we are purporting that these are real people doing real things so you can’t help it. One of the essences of Tom Haverford is he loves hip-hop and pop culture and the Fast and the Furious movies and it would be limiting to not have him reference those things. They’re not hard and fast rules, and sometimes we’ll break them but I think you kind of can’t avoid it. A lot of comedy is about people getting references and recognizing and being able to relate to something. Pop things that are very big in the culture whether they’re political scandals or recording artists, those are things that are points of reference for people, so I think at some point you’re going to have to at least make reference to some of them.

Do you think that Cheers was ready to go, or do you think it could have kept on going?
The show was so huge that I’m sure that they would have had it go on forever if they could have. But comedies aren’t like procedural dramas. Law & Order can be just as good in season twenty as it was in season one, theoretically, but comedy is a different animal. I think that at a certain point you’ve done 10,000 jokes about Woody being stupid and you’ve done 10,000 jokes about Sam chasing women … it probably could have kept going but would it have been a good idea? Probably not. You probably want to say these characters have reached some logical conclusions and the characters had undergone a tremendous amount of change and growth, so I think it was probably a good move to end it.

When I think back to that show I still remember the names of the writers very distinctly from the credits: Ken Levine and David Isaacs, Cherie Eichen and Bill Steinkellner, Phoef Sutton, Rob Long and Dan Staley … Have you worked with any of these people since then and shared your love of their work?
I haven’t, but my wife worked with Phoef Sutton. I remember very clearly asking her, "Who’s the showrunner?" and she said, "Oh, it’s this guy Phoef Sutton" and I felt like she just said Mick Jagger. I got to meet him lately and told him how much I love Cheers. Those names in that font on the opening credits are still very resonant for me.

Were writing staffs much smaller then? I feel like the same names appeared over and over again.
Because Cheers was so good and because it was such a big hit, it was probably the case if you got a job there you didn’t leave. It was a good gig. It might be that you remember their names because they were around for a long time. Because at the time you didn’t miss an episode of Cheers. It was on, you watched it. And they had a long opening theme song, which no shows do anymore, and their credits played out very slowly and were onscreen for a good amount of time. As opposed to now the credits are being flashed at light speed in the lower third of the screen during the tag of the show. It’s such a different world. The Cheers pilot timed out at 24:58. That’s ridiculous! The running time for our show is 21:17. The four episodes we picked, it was the pilot, one from season five, one from season nine, and one from season eleven. I wrote down the times: They were 24:58 in the pilot, and 24:37 for season five and season nine it was 23:56 and the finale was 23:19, and that’s probably with some extra time that they threw in because it was the finale and they didn’t care if it ran long. Over the course of this show’s life they lost a minute and a half of actual running time and that trend continues and things like writing credits and producing credits are just crunched down and buried somewhere and you don’t have the same kind of connecting feeling when you see people’s names on the screen.

It's also funny to look back at how long the theme song was compared to now.
When [Brady Bunch and Gilligan's Island creator] Sherwood Schwartz died recently there was a lot of talk about that. Because his whole thing was that you need the credit sequence to explain what the show is. That’s why the Gilligan Island theme is "Sit right back and you’ll hear a tale … " and they tell you the whole story. Same with The Brady Bunch: Here's a guy, here are his kids, here's a woman, here’s her kids, and now all the kids live together and also there’s a maid. They just told you what the show is. And to some extent Cheers does the same thing. The theme song and these old sepia tone photographs of people in bars are essentially telling you without actually telling that as long as there have been cities there have been places like this — taverns, bars, and inns — where people go to have a drink and let the stress of the days and their cares sort of wash away. And that was also a very instructive credit sequence. Now what you get is nothing. You get the title of the show and a little three-note piano sting and you move on. When Greg Daniels was doing The Office and when we were doing Parks and Rec together, we really wanted a theme song and an opening credit sequence because it’s really what puts you in the mood to watch the show. It transports you from your couch to the world that you’re entering, it has a very real psychological effect on people, it’s almost Pavlovian: When they hear the theme song they think about your characters. There's a lot of pressure to get rid of it because of the time that gets crunched down every year, and they say, "Let’s just jump into the show." I remember watching My Name Is Earl; I don’t know when it started, but I was watching an episode and the theme song was a picture of Jason Lee and you just heard him say, "My name is Earl." It's like, well, I knew that from the title. I like that show, but it was sad that there wasn’t a kind of mood-setting piece of music. Our opening title sequence is twenty seconds long, and if you can’t carve twenty seconds out of the half an hour you’ve been given to try to set a mood and try to make the experience of watching feel like a little mini-journey for people, I think you’re missing out.

You rewatched the Thanksgiving episode, which has the famous food fight. What strikes me in that scene is it looks like a group of people who really like each other having a food fight; like, that this might happen during their lunch break.
It’s been said about Parks and Rec that the characters generally like each other, which I love hearing because it’s true, and it’s also partly that the actors really like each other. I have that same feeling about the food fight. You could almost see the delight in everyone’s face in the moments leading up it, you can really see they know what they’re going to do and they’re really excited for it, and when it finally erupts it's so cathartic. One of the reasons I suggested that episode and remember it so fondly is I remember thinking that looks like so much fun, like it’s a bunch of people who are incredibly lucky that this is their job. It’s also easily the only episode in the history of television of any show that mentions Caravaggio, Emily Dickinson, and Joan of Arc and also has a food fight.

Read more posts by Josh Wolk

Filed Under: tv, cheers, kirstie alley, michael schur, parks and recreation, shelley long, ted danson, woody harrelson

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Exit Through The GIF Shop. (That Miike GIF is particularly well-suited for the form.)

Each of these astonishing cinematographs (animated .GIFs) by Gusaf Mantel distill the essence of a cinematic moment into a living, breathing "movie still." Once you start gazing into them, you'll find it hard to stop...

Above: The apes and the monolith: "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). Below: The tension of Travis Bickle, keeping his television perpetually balanced on the edge of smashing to the floor while Jackson Browne sings "Late for the Sky" on "American Bandstand": "Taxi Driver" (Martin Scorsese, 1976).

Above: Chewing up the scenery in the War Room: "Dr. Strangelove" (Stanley Kubrick, 1964). Below: Jack Elam waits: ("Once Upon a Time in the West," Sergio Leone, 1968).

Above: Waiting for the elevator: "Eraserhead" (David Lynch, 1977). Below: Cigarette burns: "Fight Club" (David Fincher, 1999).

Above: House of rain: "Solaris" (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972). Below: On the verge of rebirth: "2001: A Space Odyssey" (Stanley Kubrick, 1968).

Above: "Audition" (Takashi Miike, 2000).

Explore the full gallery here.

(tip: @bournecinema)

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"This would be pointless if the media wasn't a willing participant."

For the player, it's about status and respect. The dollar amount is simply another realm for competition, and negotiations are often about being the highest-paid player at a particular position. Or, at least, the highest-paid player on paper.

This numbers game would be pointless if the media wasn't a willing participant. Football writers should know better than anyone that these deals are structured to generate a good headline, yet they can rarely be bothered to investigate how much a player will really earn.

Florio explains how the game works. "The agent calls a member of the media to say the contract is done and gives them the figures," he says. "The reporter doesn't want to get scooped, so they rush to get it out on Twitter. They file a story, and then they move on." It's not that they don't know. It's that deadline pressure trumps accuracy.

I was put in mind of this recently by a superb blog post — “The Art of Working in Public” — by Robin Sloan, one of my favorite thinkers/novelists. Robin was impressed by a couple of pieces of online writing — one by Matt Webb and one by one by Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic. In Webb’s case, he was posting a regular weekly summary of his actions and thoughts as he goes about his job; in Madrigal’s case, it was a more-traditional piece of journalism — a description of his visit to the digital arm of the New York Public Library. Robin argues that both neatly illustrate the unique cognitive style of public thinking.

What is that style? It’s a delicate balance. The writers give you a glimpse into their thought processes — “they both conjure a sense that the piece is almost being written as you read it. It feels like they’re just a graf or two ahead, and if you picked up the pace, you could catch them— overtake their blinking cursors. It feels slightly chaotic and totally thrilling.” Yet, Robin points out, they don’t give away too much. They’re thinking out loud, but also privately; they’re using the public part to help catalyze their internal sense-making processes. Or as Robin sums it up in a lovely koan: “Work in public. Reveal nothing.”

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#conversationoncool