There’s a thread of denial currently on the www.lukeisback.com site with LIB reporting that AVN has been sold to Playboy, with AVN’s Paul Fishbein apparently stating for the record, “Shame on you for printing this. Completely false. Irresponsible and shameful. Your f—ing anynymous sources are full of s—. Total disgrace.”

Tod Hunter writes: I was reading Chuck Jones’ autobiography (“Chuck Amuck”) and found that Leon Schlesinger, who owned the Warner Bros. cartoon studio, sold the whole operation — lock, stock, and Daffy Duck — to Warner Bros. in 1944 and kept all the money himself, without cutting in the directors and artists who made the company worth selling in the first place.

(For their part, the animators didn’t much like Schlesinger and modeled Sylvester the cat’s lisp and Daffy Duck’s lisp and attitude on Schlesinger, who never caught on, according to Jones, who would watch Leon sit in his screening room and exclaim “I love that Daffy Duck voithe! How did you guyth think of that?”)

I told Gene [that’s me] about this selling-the-studio business, and he reflected that if Paul ever sold the company — we were on Valjean and the Hustler’s-gonna-buy-us rumors were flying — he would probably do the same thing.

Just to crack Gene up, I went to the art department and asked them to add the words “A Leon Schlesinger Production” at the end on the boilerplate at the bottom of the Table of Contents on the issue we were working on. I gave it to Gene for his approval and he OK’d it, and when I pointed out the little note at the end of the boilerplate he cracked up.

This is not the first time this rumor has surfaced. More like the tenth.”