Shelley Winters: “Wait A Minute—Where Am I?”

By Helen Dudar Writers Bloc June 1980 Shelley Winters has written the story of her life. Anyone who has followed her flourishing career on the talk show circuit will be pardoned for asking what she possibly has left to tell. The TV addict who really keeps track of...

Ivan Passer: Making It Cutter’s Way

By Fred Schruers The Washington Post December 13, 1981 Ivan Passer’s film Cutter’s Way, now at the Key Theater, is one of those rare movies that has led a heroic life of its own. Like a boxer in some Hollywood ring drama, beset by skeptics and loan sharks and battered...

Madonna: The Naked Truth

By James Kaplan Entertainment Weekly May 17, 1991 She is small, and her hair looks terrible. Distressed. Long and ratty, a bad white-yellow with a greenish tinge (dark roots are struggling back), it appears to have fallen victim to one too many dye jobs. Blond...

Scorsese’s Strange Realm 

By Fred Schruers The Washington Post May 8, 1983   Last night at the Cannes Film Festival, Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy played to a glittering crowd at the new Palais des Festivals, appearing as the prestigious opening-night entry in the competition. Back...

Is Randy Newman a Redneck Cole Porter—Or Just Strange?

By Grover Lewis Playboy September, 1983 Randy Newman is chary of interviewers by reflex, bless his level sense, but bent even more unbendingly in that direction since the critical shitstorm mounted in the pop-squeak press against his fifth album of art songs, Good Old...

The Double Life of Peter O’Toole

By O’Connell Driscoll Playboy August 1982 The House on Stradella Road in Bel Air had tall iron security gates, which were standing open. Sitting in the center of the driveway—and blocking the entrance—was a black Cadillac limousine with darkened windows. A chauffeur...

Thriller of the Century: The Third Man

By Ron Rosenbaum The New York Observer January 17, 2000 Wait a minute, I’m not finished. I was just getting started. I’ve got more awards to bestow for Bests of the Century. I was just warming up last month when I named Pale Fire Best English Language Novel of the...

And Don’t Call Her Bogie’s Baby

By Tom Burke The New York Times March 22, 1970 Detroit She isn’t even mildly fatigued. For eight nerve‐shredding weeks, Lauren Bacall has been trying out her first musical, Applause, nightly belting a dozen songs in her big applejack‐brandy alto And swooping through...

Nick Nolte Hangs Tough

By O’Connell Driscoll Playboy September 1979 “It’s One-Fifteen,” the man in the green-corduroy jacket said. “He was supposed to be here at one. My appointment was for one o’clock.” The man said this to a middle-aged woman who was sitting at a desk on the other side of...

The Post-Celluloid Tristesse of Raquel Welch

By O’Connell Driscoll Playboy February 1977 It is the day before the Academy Awards. There is a small crowd of people standing in a light rain outside the stage door entrance to the Music Center, in downtown Los Angeles. The rain has been falling all day, and now, at...

Looking for The Real Thing

By George Malko The Stacks Reader July 30, 2019 When I met George Malko a few years ago he told me about his friendship with Pauline Kael which began after he profiled her for Audience magazine in 1972. Kael was the one who invited George to a press screening of...

The Making of “Fat City”

By Leonard Shecter Look October 19, 1971 The scene called for Billy Tully, played by Stacey Keach, to be thinning and weeding young tomatoes under a broiling sun. It’s sweaty, backbreaking working that must, because of the delicacy required, be done with a short,...