By Alex Belth Esquire Classic August 2016 Robert Benton is best known as a screenwriter (Bonnie and Clyde, What’s Up Doc?,and Superman), and director (The Late Show, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Nobody’s Fool), but before he lost it at the movies, Benton was the art...
By John H. Richardson Premiere December 1997 “I’m getting bored here,” Cameron is saying. “I went for popcorn 10 minutes ago.” He is speaking into a handheld cordless microphone, his voice booming down from the astonishingly crisp overhead speakers like the voice of...
By Steve Oney Los Angeles Magazine May 2005 “The boardwalk squeaks and out come the freaks,” declares Ian McShane, plainly including himself in the assortment of street preachers, panhandlers, and body builders gathered at Venice Beach on this foggy spring morning....
By Alex Belth Esquire Classic October 2016 Fame is fleeting in all pop culture—movies, music, writing, sports: today’s stars, tomorrow’s Where Are They Now’s. This feels especially true in journalism. Who but a small group of nonfiction-loving nerds pays attention to...
By Stacy Title New York Woman October 1990 The very sight of Brooke Shields, the six-foot icon slash model slash actress, puts people into shock. Whatever they’re doing, they stop. Here in the Pan Am terminal at La Guardia, wearing a fitted, floral dress—magenta and...
By John H. Richardson Premiere February 1992 David Cronenberg is demonstrating a typewriter out of every writer’s worst nightmare—a huge fat beetle with legs the size of celery sticks, wings as big as plates, and typewriter keys for teeth. Between the wings is a...
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 The National Observer May 20, 1976 I came from this incredibly high-powered family. My mother was sort of a Viking. Very bright, and utterly contemptuous of everyone else. When I told her I had read The Three Musketeers, she said, “undoubtedly a waste...
By Gerri Hirshey GQ February 1997 Garry Shandling is worrying a piece of plain chicken (no skin, no sauce, no guilt) with a plastic fork. The tines quiver with indecision (eat? talk? eat and talk and risk having a meteor of thigh meat land on those dry-cleaned jeans …...
By Eve Babitz Smart Fall 1988 < Not that I like the eighties, but the sixties, if you ask me, weren’t that great, either. I mean, in the fifties, for men to get girls into bed, they had to be good lovers, to persist, to be sensual and seductive and inevitable and...
By Eve Babitz Smart May/ June 1989 [From Eve’s front of the book column titled “Love & Science”] I have been thinking that Linda Ronstadt is more politically effective than Jane Fonda. Linda has made the world safe for Mexican music. I mean, all Jane’s done is to...
By Cullen Murphy From Cartoon Country 2017 Click. That was my after-school job—pressing down on the shutter release—from around the age of six until sometime in my teens. My father had bought a Polaroid camera in 1949, soon after the first one came on the market, the...
