By Alex Belth Bronx Banter June 15, 2011 My father was an incorrigible name dropper. He called famous actors and directors by their first names, suggesting an intimacy that didn’t always exist. He had met a lot of celebrities when he worked as a unit production...
By Mark Kram Esquire November 1989 How civilized the fame game was then, a timid, furtive glimpse for the observer, the observed cordoned off by a dreamlike distance of respect. Worship knew its place; so did greatness. It was caught sharply once by a young American...
By Peter Richmond GQ July 1992 The lights are rheostated low inside a customized bus parked on Tenth Avenue in Manhattan at nine o’clock on a winter dark evening. Two candle flames dance on a table. Eddie Murphy stares at them, without speaking. Hammer just dropped...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader The origins of “The Gookie,” from one of the great showbiz memoirs, Harpo Speaks! The man who first inspired me to become an actor was a guy called Gookie. Gookie had nothing to do with the theatre. He rolled cigars in the window of a...
By Robert Ward Rolling Stone March 3, 1983 “He drank too much and smoked too much. He granted too many interviews full of cynical observations about himself and his business. He made too many bad movies and hardly any of the kind that stir critics to rapture or that,...
By Paul Slansky Playboy July 1983 It’s Thanksgiving Eve in NBC studio 6-A, and Albert Brooks is talking about bowling. “In every bowling alley, there’s a room just a little bit larger than this desk called the pro shop,” he tells David Letterman. “It’s full of balls...
By John H. Richardson Premiere October 1989 Joel and Ethan Coen’s new movie, Miller’s Crossing, opens with an oddly poignant shot of a hat blowing through an autumn forest. A little later, Tom, the hero, tells Verna, his mistress, that he dreamed he was walking in the...
By David Freeman Esquire April 1982 From December 1978 to May 1979, Alfred Hitchcock and I collaborated on a script. I was the last screenwriter to work with him before his death. The time we spent together was always decorous, frequently pleasant, occasionally tense....
By Ross Wetzsteon New York Magazine March 14, 1988 Flying. He’d wanted to fly since he was 16. Sitting at his desk in high school in Greenwood, Mississippi, he fantasized that it was a P-51 Mustang, F-86 Sabre jet. He didn’t want to be a pilot, he wanted to be a...
By Robert Ward GQ March 1984 As I walk into James Garner’s suite at the Palisades Hotel in Vancouver, British Columbia, I suddenly feel as though I’m the Dude From the East accidentally strolling into the back room in Black Bart’s Saloon. There, sitting around a table...
By Robert Ward Crawdaddy April 1978 Paco is in a world of trouble. He has this noose around his neck, see, and he is balanced ever so precariously on this tombstone, which is just about to tip over on the godforsaken plain. Miles and miles of sagebrush. Not a human...
By Robert Ward American Film March 1983 Character actor Frank Pesce has a problem. He is supposed to be standing in the rain with this menacing look on his face, pointing a rod at Gene Hackman. He is playing the gunsel who backs up surly Mickey Rourke, crazy Joe...
