The Leader of the Lost Boys: A Success Story

By E. Graydon Carter Smart January/February 1990 The show was over, Saturday Night Live had just celebrated a milestone on television with an awards ceremony for itself—a live, clip-heavy, two-and-a-half-hour prime-time special. NBC’s Studio 8H in Rockefeller Center,...

Dancing With The Devil

By Charles P. Pierce The National Sports Daily August 9, 1990 It’s a fact of life in this great land that very few clerics commit capital crimes and that very few choirboys punch people senseless for sport. If you choose to bring the law to the people who commit the...

From Chinatown to Niketown

By Michael Sragow SF Weekly September 30, 1998 In 1974 Robert Towne was seething about the lot of his script for Chinatown, now considered his most famous work. Released that same year, the screenplay won an Oscar for Towne. When I interviewed him at the time, he was...

Three Cheers for the Literary Anthology

By John Schulian The Los Angeles Times August 18, 1991 Exactly one day before I raised my right hand and marched into the Army in that blighted year of 1968, I saw the future I wanted. It was a sight that had eluded me throughout graduate school, but now, with the...

David Milch, Spin Doctor

By Steve Oney Buzz May 1994 Back at Yale, the professor and Pulitzer-prize-winning author Robert Penn Warren would tell his protégé, David Milch, that the secret to Herman Melville’s poems is that they spin against the way they drive – that is, that even as their...

Bad Vibes in Tune Town

By Stephen Fried Vanity Fair February 1995 In the fall of 1993, the ominous letters and phone calls began to come in to Gerald Levin’s office on the top floor of the Time Warner Building in Rockefeller Center. There weren’t hundreds of them, but each was from somebody...

The Heidi Chronicle

By Stephen Fried Vanity Fair May 1993 Buck Henry takes a bite of chicken hash and leans forward to speak above the restaurant din. “It’s like we’re part of a secret society, or a club of some kind,” he says. “People come out to that house for these parties, and a lot...

The Brady Offensive

By Ron Rosenbaum Vanity Fair January 1991 “A hostage situation”—that’s what the cops are calling it—has James Brady rolling rapidly in his wheelchair through the dimly lit third-floor corridor of the Capitol building. At his side—tight-lipped, nervous about being late...

Damn Good Fella

By Stephen Fried GQ November 1991 The scene is like something out of a colorized Citizen Kane or some surreal awards ceremony. Actor Ray Liotta stands in front of a microphone and podium, shadowy from the light of a pin-point bulb, while, on the other side of the...

The Trash-Mouth Wisdom of Chris Rock

By Fred Schruers Rolling Stone October 2, 1997 A summer night in Brooklyn, N.Y., and a fine one. You can actually sit on your kitchen chair, instead of the stoop, and feel the breeze off Upper New York Bay. The streets of Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant district are...

Creative Tension

By Stephen Fried The Washington Post Magazine April 16, 1995 Kay Jamison slouches her lanky frame over the lectern, looks up through her blond bangs, and delivers a bold second opinion on the medical condition of a world-renowned patient. Her insights come about a...

Shoplift Lit: You Are What You Steal

By Ron Rosenbaum The New York Observer September 29, 1999 So I’m in this car with Dennis Hopper and Sean Penn, two generations of Hollywood Bad Boys. Hopper’s driving, Penn’s in the back. This is maybe a dozen years ago when Sean was still with Madonna, and Hopper had...