By Gail Sheehy Us Weekly July 15, 1985 Show up at the opening-night party for Perfect in a strapless Betty Boop dress that makes you smile. Feel cute. Feel sweet. Don’t vamp out. Shimmy into the club like you’re doing it on tiptoes, because tonight, Jamie Lee Curtis,...
By Diane K. Shah GQ January 1986 “Yeah,” I said into the telephone. “Diane Shah?” “Yeah.” It was ten-fifteen in the morning. I was in the office filling out an expense report, a chore that always makes me grumpy. I am never in the office at this hour, so I figured...
By Marcelle Clements From The Dog Is Us 1985 Fred Astaire is my hero, and I don’t care who knows it. “Gimme a break!” sneer the technocrats, the pseudo-dandies with the punk haircuts, all those who favor business lunches and open relationships. Yes, they will mock,...
By Elizabeth Kaye Smart May 1990 Old bodybuilders fade away, open gyms of their own, or become religious fanatics. These are grim potentials, indeed, and unsuitable to Arnold Schwarzenegger, a dubious icon who determined, at age ten, to be “one of the top percent in...
By Pauline Kael The New Yorker October 5, 1987 It’s hard to believe that a great comedy could be made of the blitz, but John Boorman has done it. In his new, autobiographical film, Hope and Glory, he has had the inspiration to desentimentalize wartime England and show...
By Harold Conrad Smart July/August 1989 “In the end, everything is a gag.” —Charlie Chaplin It is 4:30 a.m. on a Saturday in January. Bill Murray has just driven his Jeep from Malibu to Palm Springs. I am waiting in his suite at Maxim’s de Paris, an ultrafancy spot in...
By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader I’d heard nothing but good things about Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Morgan Neville’s new documentary about Fred Rogers. Plus, our pal Tom Junod is a featured talking head in the movie and I was excited for him to be a part of it. Tom, if...
By George Malko The Distillery Winter 1998 Originally published as a short story in The Distillery, Vol. V, No. 1, in the Winter 1998 issue, it is all true, everything happened as I describe it. The movie star in question is no longer alive. Nor is the producer. I did...
By Brad Darrach Playboy June 1972 Roaring like a stegosaurus, a yellow monster crashed into a green country store and knocked the front out. A church spire tilted silently and fell off like a hat. Bricks exploded, dust hid the sun. With a flash and a boom, a big brass...
By Dave Kehr Chicago Magazine April 1980 The first movie ever made, an 1877 experiment by Eadweard Muybridge, was about horses. And when the movies reached maturity, around the turn of the century, the genre that quickly established itself as the most popular and...
By Sergei Eisenstein From On Disney 1986 Alma-Ata, 16, November 1941 ‘The work of this master is the greatest contribution of the American people to art.’ Dozens and dozens of newspaper clippings, modifying this sentence in various ways, pour down upon the astonished...
By Elizabeth Kaye Playboy October 2010 I’m driving on Sunset Boulevard, heading east, passing thickets of scarlet bougainvillea. I’m on my way to meet Sasha Grey, the 22-year-old star of countless adult films who doesn’t have breast implants, blonde hair or collagen...
