By Pete Dexter Esquire May 1985 All right, let’s start with the head. Say check-out time is 1:00 and everybody who reads this magazine is stuck in a room at a Holiday Inn somewhere in Louisiana because nobody can figure out how to unlock the security chain, and...
By Michael Sragow The Boston Phoenix March 5, 1985 Now that it’s arrived in its uncut, 227-minute, director-approved form, Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America emerges as a pulp masterwork—at once the simplest and most indescribable of movies. In a sense, it’s...
By Ivan Solotaroff The Village Voice Late ’80s [Date Unknown] Collected in No Success Like Failure On the third step of the entrance to the Palace Hotel on the Bowery and Third Street I catch an unmistakable whiff of aging vomit; halfway up the steep concrete stairs I...
By John Schulian GQ March 1985 They were drinking their dinner in a joint outside Chicago. It was just Mike Royko and his pal, Big Shack, and whatever their bleary musings happened to be that night three years ago. They probably never even gave a thought to the fact...
By Pauline Kael The New Yorker June 29, 1987 Chicago circa 1930—AI Capone’s capital of crime—looks so much better than New York City looks right now that local audiences for The Untouchables may feel somewhat chagrined. Chicago still has solid traces of Louis Sullivan...
By Diane K. Shah Sport December 1986 It is a hot Los Angeles afternoon, sun beating down on the city, burning through the blanket of thick, brown smog lying on top of the basin. But here on Sunset Plaza Drive where Jim Brown’s house sits at the highest point of this...
By Eve Babitz American Film 1987 Whenever I think about James Woods, it is either as the affront he was in Split Image, where he plays the cure almost worse than the disease for a family who wants to have their kid deprogrammed from some Moonie-type cult, or else—and...
By Mark Jacobson Esquire April 1985 I went for a ride through downtown Philadelphia with Julius Erving in his Maserati the other day, and with each passing block it became more apparent: Julius cannot drive very well. It wasn’t a question of reckless speed or ignored...
By Pat Jordan Inside Sports 1980 This is a story about Southern California, and baseball, and sex, and fame, and wealth, and beauty, and the American Dream. It is a story about a famous athlete and his beautiful wife and the life they live in that rarefied atmosphere...
By Joe Flaherty Film Comment August 1982 For sheer emotional impact, the two movies that struck a deep societal chord over the last decade were Death Wish and Rocky. The first is easy to fathom. Charles Bronson (if he’s frightened, we’re not paranoid) cinematically...
By Joe Flaherty Inside Sports January 1981 All lives are failures in some degree or another. Somewhere along the line we fudge the pristine youthful dream. Even when we achieve, the compromises we’ve made, the injuries we’ve inflicted sully the prize. But most of us...
By Warren Leight and Charlie Rubin The Village Voice January 17, 1989 NEWS ITEM: Young dies in September ’87 When I first arrived here, I took one look at the place and I felt… well, let down. I figured Heaven should be a playground filled with stickball-playing kids...
