Bugs Bunny at 50, April 15, 1990

On the occasion of Bugs Bunny's 50th anniversary, I wrote a feature page cover appreciation of my favorite cartoon character. One of our staff artists, Larry Stephens, drew a great Bugs in a trenchcoat, looking very much like Humphrey Bogart -- cool. We decided to run it by Warner Bros. since Bugs is trademarked and the studio warned us against using it -- because Warren Beatty's "Dick Tracy" was coming out and they thought it looked like something from that film. So we used some WB stock art instead. After the thing was published, I sent a clip to the WB press people as a courtesy, and they were so thrilled with it they had it cleaned up from the newsprint version on beautiful white Velox paper and sent me back a rolled copy suitable for framing.

By DONALD PORTER
Standard-Examiner staff

They say Bugs Bunny turns 50 this year. Which is like saying the Bible is a thick book -- it simply doesn't begin to tell the story. Bugs Bunny is ageless, so his being 50 years old is irrelevant -- except that it gives us one helluva good excuse to think about him.

So, on Easter Sunday as bunnies come to mind, let's do just that: Picture ol' Bugs in your mind. What do you see? Maybe he's casually nibbling a carrot and asking, "What's up, Doc?" while Elmer Fudd's double-barreled shotgun rests on the bridge of his nose. Or he has Yosemite Sam in such a snit that the mustachioed hothead is bouncing up and down on the heels of his boots like a superball on concrete. Or perhaps Daffy Duck is trying -- in eternal futility -- to outwit that wascally wabbit.

Whatever image springs to your mind, one thing's certain: You are smiling. It's impossible to ponder the Bugster and not smile. Einstein proved that; look it up.

Nobody ever gets the best of Bugs, because even in defeat -- which is rare -- Bugs has the last word. He is the coolest. The hippest. The best that's ever been.

Jeffrey Boam interview, June 1995

This is not a complete transcript of the interview. My vague recollection was that I was facing a pretty tight deadline, and so I skimmed through the recording and only transcribed the notes I thought I might use in the interview story. That said, the nuggets here are pretty interesting, given the way things played out:

* On “Lethal Weapon IV”: Jeffrey got no credit whatsoever. It turned out to be another bad “Lethal Weapon” experience with Warner Bros. and Richard Donner. Before the interview, he sent me a copy of the screenplay. At the time, I suspected he was eager to talk about it because he felt like it might be slipping away and going to another writer, and so he was trying to salvage it. His script, if I’m remembering correctly, involved the Los Angeles Lakers on a jet and a terrorist attack.

* He also mentions “The Phantom,” which he alluded to in our earlier interview. That movie bombed.

* On the fourth “Indiana Jones” movie, he didn’t get a credit, either. But what little he says about it sounds like George Lucas had the story pretty well set even back in the mid-1990s.

Don Porter: THE RIGHT-WING TERRORISM THING SEEMS PRETTY DEAD-ON.

Jeffrey Boam: “It seemed kind of far-fetched when I wrote it. [The Oklahoma City bombing] kind of spooked me a little bit, actually.”

The Jeffrey Boam interview, 1992

In the late 1980s and early '90s, I guested a couple of times a week on KALL-AM radio in Salt Lake City with DJ Peter Boam, who went by the on-air handle of "Peter B." He's a great guy, and we had a lot of fun talking movies and showbiz. It was during the waning days of so-called "full-service" radio, when listeners got music, news and talk all rolled into one.

Peter's brother was the late Jeffrey Boam, who unfortunately passed away in January 2000. Jeffrey was a tremendously successful screenwriter who penned scripts for movies including "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," "Lethal Weapon 2," "Lethal Weapon 3," "Innerspace," "The Dead Zone," "Funny Farm," "The Lost Boys" and "Straight Time." (He also was a writer-producer on one of my favorite, but sadly short-lived, TV series, "The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.")

I first met Jeffrey in 1989 or 1990. While the family was vacationing at Disneyland, I took a few hours in the middle of the day and drove up to the Warner Bros. lot -- where Jeffrey was under contract -- and interviewed him in his offices there.