Sam Peckinpah in Mexico: Overlearning with El Jefe

By Grover Lewis Rolling Stone October 12, 1972 Limping delicately as if his boots are a couple of sizes too tight, so rockinghorse loaded on Juarez tequila he’d flunk a knee-walking test, Roy Jenson, one of the neo-Wild Bunch of characters and character actors that...

Up in Fat City: On The Set With Keach And Huston

By Grover Lewis Rolling Stone 1971 Stockton, Calif.—The Memorial Civic Auditorium, located not far from the central ganglia of this crumby hick town, is old, cavernous, sweltering hot, and overripe with the stink of vintage sweat and piss. The litter-strewn floors are...

The Eyes of Winter

By Peter Richmond GQ January 1995 He answers the door in slippers, a polite and questioning half-smile set off by tortoiseshell bifocals perched on the bridge of his nose. He offers toast in the kitchen of his prewar penthouse late on a Sunday morning when the New...

An Ordinary Man

By Steve Oney Premiere March 1988 Harrison Ford is walking purposefully along a wooden plank sidewalk in a town somewhere in the Rockies. He moves with a sturdy grace, well-muscled shoulders shifting against the yoke of his denim shirt, hips working like ball bearings...

Breaking the Wall

By Pat Jordan TV Guide (original draft) 1989 Studio Executive to Director of Stick: “You’ll have to re-shoot some scenes.”   Director to Executive: “I don’t have to re-shoot any thing. I’m Burt Reynolds.”   Executive to Director: “You used to be Burt...

Magnum, P(retty) I(ndecisive)

By Pat Jordan GQ October 1989 Tom Selleck is faced with a dilemma. He is being forced to make a decision that will annoy at least one of three people. “Well, I don’t know, Esme. What do you think?” His publicist, Esme Chandlee, who is seated beside Selleck on a sofa...

Drinks with Liberty Vance: Lee Marvin Shoots from the Hip

By Robert Ward Rolling Stone September 3, 1981 Ransom Stoddard, attorney at law, is doing his best to cover up, but the hell-forged maniac above him just keeps grunting and drooling and lashing him with a bullwhip. Stoddard is backed up as far as he can get against a...

Mel Brooks Says This Is the Funniest Man in the World

By Harry Stein Esquire June 1976 Harry Ritz will say it himself, but he prefers that others say it for him. “As far as I’m concerned,” says Mel Brooks, “Harry Ritz was the funniest man ever. His craziness and his freedom were unmatched. There was no intellectualizing...

Noodles

By Pauline Kael The New Yorker June 1, 1987 The title Tampopo, which is Japanese for “dandelion,” is the name of a fortyish widow (Nobuko Miyamoto) who is trying to make a go of the run-down noodle shop on the outskirts of Tokyo that her late husband operated. The...

A Character Actor Reaches Cult Status

By Steve Oney The New York Times Magazine November 16, 1987 On a warm afternoon earlier this fall, Harry Dean Stanton, wearing an old denim work shirt, Levis, and deck shoes, sat on the sofa of his Mullholland Drive home high above Los Angeles dispensing shopping...

Bow Down

By Alex Belth The Stacks Reader I’ve never read Conversations with Wilder, the hell is wrong with me? Man, I need to correct that. I’m  grateful that I tuned in to Alec Baldwin’s Here’s The Thing interview with Cameron Crowe, who put the book together, and has some...

Mel Brooks: The Playboy Interview

By Brad Darrach Playboy February 1975 “The rich,” according to a Spanish proverb, “laugh carefully.” They have a lot to lose. The poor, on the other hand, need to laugh in order to forget how little they have to laugh about—which may be why the Depression was the last...