Now he’s snidely mocking the actresses’ hair (which looks brown from here, bub), like HE has room to talk. Paulie Walnuts called, he wants his look back. Apparently the whole “theme” here is that Les is going to carry on like a gigantic asshole over every single detail of the production, which should make for a fun two years. It’s almost as if Les/Tom doesn’t understand that they’re actors who are capable of changing their “look” and not just random people who may or may not look exactly like Lisa. I mean Marlon Brando wasn’t a mumbling deranged lunatic warlord living in the jungle and decapitating people in real life, it was only a movie. Idiot.
A Ripping Poor Yarn
Filed under Son of Stuck Funky
Son of Stuck Funky 
“QUIET ON THE SET!” Mason shouts. “Jeeze, you two, at least pretend you’re pros!”
“And she’s acting sexy! Lisa never did that! She died a virgin!”
“For once, Les, I believe you.”
And what color is your hair, Les? Grecian Ashtray?
I can’t imagine who TomBa thinks would find this interesting. And who would find Les’ kvetching to be anything but annoying.
Love how Batty (er, Les) is sitting there, arms crossed.
Bleh, even in make believe, your story sucks Batty. That’s why there is no Pulitzer on your shelf, only stacks of unsold “Lisa’s Story “ books.
Dammit…Cindy looks like the bookish “nerdy” girl I had a huge crush on in high school in that last panel. Now I can’t snark.
I agree; Cindy is cute in glasses; reminds me of some girls I liked in college.
I do believe Brando’s butter fetish was real.
I was about to say that no one holds paper like Masone and Yarn Hair are doing here, but I have to admit I did hold a newspaper like that once in a vain attempt to cover up Funky Winkerbean.
This reminds me of a scene from one of the worst comedies ever made, Master of Disguise. Dana Carvey’s idiot character needs an assistant, so they bring in a bunch of people for an interview. Harold Gould insults and rejects them all for no clear reason, just so the character the story wants can show up and get the job. It didn’t work there and it doesn’t work here.
I know your last Hollywood exposure was a brief one, Les, but, you see, film sets have a group of people known as “hair stylists” and “make-up artists.” In real life, Margot Robbie doesn’t have whitish skin and blonde/pink/blue hair, Meryl Streep doesn’t look like Margaret Thatcher, Boris Karloff wasn’t seven feet tall with green skin and bolts in his neck, and Jeff Goldblum (probably) isn’t half insect. What a putz.
As for your Brando reveal, Epicus, thanks a lot for ruining the end of “The Godfather” for me.
I’m seeing a side of Les I never imagined. I would have thought he was the sort of grammar Nazi who would burst a blood vessel if a student ended a sentence in a preposition, but here’s the old Lord of Language eschewing formality and doing so himself. Truly, Les is multilayered, just like an onion — a dirty, stinking, mushy onion that somehow rolled behind the ‘fridge and has been rotting there for a month.
Also, kudos to the anonymous colorist who (most likely unintentionally) undermined whatever Batiuk was trying to accomplish here by giving the actress completely normal brown hair.
Anyone who follows the rule of not ending a sentence in a preposition is the grammar equivalent of the Amish. Holding to a clunky and archaic rule that has almost never been followed. You know who ended sentences with prepositions? Shakespeare.
I can’t understand why anyone would want to spend time with Les Moore, or even be in the same room with him. All he does is complain, and trust me, that gets really tiresome very quickly.
Five bucks says that if they made her up to look exactly like Lisa, he’d still find something to complain about.
Oh I get it… Les thinks he’s a comedian and wants to go all MST3K with it… Please kill me now.
Seriously… Pro athletes, actors and recording stars can get away with it, but how is a schoolteacher from Ohio this much of a shameless douche without his friends and family completely abandoning him? Even some of my most hated characters in the Funkyverse (Hank Hill, Cindye+Masone, Pete+Darrin+Chester+that old assed lady, Cliffe Angere, that comics store turd in the Batman shirt, Dinkle+Dinkle’s one-armed assistant, Krankenschaaften, Marianne Winters, that JuCo asshole who went to Iraq and now expects the entire world to cater to him, etc.), they all had at least ONE halfway decent redeeming quality… How many decades has it been since we could say that about Les? Not only have I seen douchebags in action, I myself was a douchebag for a large chunk of my life. You know what happens? People don’t even want to be around you and eventually your tiny circle of “friends” is really just “people who tolerate you”…
This is the part when Cindye remembers she has a meeting to attend, and Masone asks Les to go fetch an iced tea from the commissary which is way over on the opposite end of the studio compound…
Wait a minute… What the fuckin’ hell does she mean by “At least it photographs well!”
This is a goddamned motion picture, not a photo shoot for Vanity Fair…?
I wish Mason would just snap and rip Les a new one.
“Really, Les? You don’t like her hair color. That’s it? This is what you’re here to do? That’s what all your ‘oh no, I have to protect Lisa, boo hoo’ shit was about? That actress has been in six movies and a long-running Broadway play, but you don’t like her hair color. Which there’s nothing wrong with. And if there was, we have these people called make-up artists who can change it. This is why I paid for you to be here today? This is why I’ve involved you in every goddam phase of this production? This is why I left my beach condo in L.A. to go to your crappy Rust Belt suburb of death? So you can sit here and mock anyone I bring in to read for the part?”
“I don’t have to do this, you know. You signed a shopping agreement. Usually writers are paid for the rights and never spoken to again, but I’m trying to make YOU happy. I’m trying to be respectful to your precious Lisa. Which I can’t even do, because you won’t tell me what that means. You signed the agreement giving me the rights, Les. I can make Lisa a neo-Nazi prostitute if I want to. So you can shut up about it from now on.”
“Did you know you’ve been doing this for nine years, Les? Ann Appel told me. Yes, your agent. I called to ask her if you’re always this impossible to deal with. She said “yes.” She also said you put on this exact same act the first time you went to her office, in May 2011. TWO THOUSAND AND ELEVEN, Les. Lisa even rose from the dead to put your mind at ease about it, and nine years later you still can’t make up your mind. And to think I called you a hero? I am seriously rethinking THAT. A hero is someone who can make a decision. A hero is someone who thinks of others before himself. That is NOT you, buddy.”
“So if you want to continue to be here, you’re going to unfold your arms, you’re going to wipe that fucking pout off your face, you’re going to sit down, and you’re going to give me a real reason why these actresses aren’t right to play Lisa. If you give me any more shit, I’m flying you back to Cleveland in a pet carrier. And if you even say the words ‘kill fee’, I will throw you off the Hollywood sign myself. That’s another little insider secret for you, Les: famous actors have powerful friends. And there isn’t a jury in California that would convict me once I testify what a smug, disruptive prick you were.”
Lisa a neo-Nazi prostitute? Now that’s a “Lisa’s Story” I would pay to see.
Your words should be carved in stone. A lot of stones, which should be used to surround Batiuk’s house.
Bravo to our potassium rich friend. I stand in line good sir.
Can we vote to make you the writer of Funky Winkerbean for this arc? I think readership would skyrocket.
My first attempt at re-writing the strip:
Brilliant
This is all just Batiuk’s fantasy justification for why no one wants to make a Lisa’s Story movie. It’s not that it’s a terrible book full of unlikable people…no, no, it has to be that Hollywood knows it cannot possibly do it justice. They can’t get it right, and they know that, so that’s why they aren’t trying. And why the phone isn’t ringing.
Fuck you, Les
It is amazing how much, in the first panel, Les looks like a three-year old just about to have a tantrum because his parents are taking him out of a toy store without buying him what he wants. Seriously, he really does. Does Batiuk look at these strips after they’re drawn and approve them? Can it be that he can’t see it, or does he actually want Les to look like a giant toddler?
Les is okay, though, with his role being played by a handsome (in F-verse terms) blond actor 20-30 yrs younger than him? No demands that Mason dye his hair or wear black-framed glasses NOW?
This has never been about portraying Lisa. It’s about Les’s refusal to share Lisa/hisManPain. Like a kid who won’t let you look at his scraped knee to clean and bandage it, just clutches his injury and yells.
Something every published writer has to deal with at some point is that the book you wrote and the book the reader read are not the same book. Your vicious villain is the reader’s troubled bad boy. Your feisty heroine is the reader’s mean girl. If Les found Goodreads or Amazon and saw reviews from actual readers, he’d probably demand the recall and pulping of the entire print run of Lisa’s Story so no more unholy eyes could profane his personal temple.
No, wait, he wouldn’t pulp them. He’d build them into a pyramid for Lisa’s ashes. And some dead leaves.
Les sounds like the long-ago and long-forgotten critic who whined that “Meryl Streep acts with her hair.” Whatever that was supposed to mean.
Seriously, Batiuk, can’t you have your avatar come up with some reasonable objections to the actresses? And remember, if they don’t look and act like Lisa, well, look at the anthropoid who’s going to portray Les. Or does Mason Jarre look exactly like your secret self-image?