Five years ago, this interview would have been such the big deal—the coup of the year, the elusive great white at last wriggling on the hook. At least, that’s how she was treated back then, when she still took her meals in that velvet closet. She attracted the spotlight (some…
So this is what it’s come to: another week, another terrorist-with-a-suitcase-nuke movie. Last Friday, it was up to Ben Affleck to save the world from nuclear annihilation, an unsavory proposition. He succeeded, but not before the Super Bowl disappeared in a holocaust flash. This Friday, it’s Chris Rock’s turn to…
It’s one of the great ironies of the modern-day smut biz that it took a boob burglar like Joe Francis to shake Hugh Hefner’s once-mighty empire to its creaky knees. Francis is all of 28, which means he wasn’t born the first time Hef bagged triplets on the merry-go-round bed…
When this column began at the beginning of 2000, readers and editors scoffed at its occasional subject matter, the comic book. Kids’ stuff, they growled, junk food for adults who still live in their parents’ basements. And maybe they were right back then. The industry was dying; the art form…
There has always been something infuriating, if not appalling, about killing thousands of people in the name of blockbuster entertainment. Before September 11, no one thought much about it. Audiences accepted wholesale slaughter on the big screen because they knew there would be some sort of payoff — revenge, redemption,…
Thirty-four years later, Carson has returned to the school to deliver a series of lectures on the power of fable and film as metaphor, and he asked Coppola, whose film was partially inspired by David Holzman, to join him. Carson—who appears in Coppola’s feature debut, CQ, and who helped Roman…
Last month GQ ran a disquietingly flattering profile of Joe Roth, who, in January 2000, quit his gig as Walt Disney Studios chairman to “revolutionize the industry” (GQ’s words) by forming his own studio. With a billion bucks on loan from men with money and bridges to burn — among…
“This is contrary to how we grew up,” Stacy Peralta is saying a few minutes after getting dropped off at a newspaper office by a limo driver. The 45-year-old Peralta, still SoCal handsome and boyish beneath a ball cap and behind a well-trimmed beard, grins long and hard–a real hell-yeah…
The “official” record — Stereo, credited to Paul Westerberg, remember him? — is sloppy in an “artful” way, meaning songs abruptly end when the tape runs out while others collapse when the guy singing them peters out; they’re demos, or sound like them, assembled from two years’ worth of basement…
Peter Bogdanovich, maybe the last man alive who wears a neckerchief without irony, holds a copy of a newspaper article in which his old friend Larry McMurtry is saying nice, or not nice, things about him–Bogdanovich can’t tell which. “He’s kind of risen from the dead,” McMurtry was quoted as…
It’s getting harder and harder to tell the good Neil Young records from the bad ones; they’re all blending into the same backfiring buzz, differentiated only by the guitar he chooses to pick up and/or plug in. At this late date, all of it sounds like Rust Never Sleeps or…
On a good day, Mark Cuban might respond to a journalist’s query with a terse, unpunctuated e-mail that reads like something dashed off by a hostage while his captors are in the can. It’s understandable: The man’s running the Dallas Mavericks, investing in movie distribution and exhibition companies, sticking it…
On September 10, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Big Trouble, a slight comic caper drenched in the sweltering muck of Miami, was a nagging chore to be tended to by film critics — one more mediocre multimillion-dollar all-star fiasco in which you can almost hear the filmmakers giggling behind the cameras. On September…
Before he died of congestive heart failure in March 1992, Richard Brooks, director of The Blackboard Jungle and In Cold Blood, used to tell this story. It takes place sometime in the late 1940s, when Brooks was ascending royalty in Hollywood; after all, he’d written John Huston’s Key Largo, starring…
Dan Bryk, a frumpy Canuck who refuses to give his age but looks to be in his 20s, sits on an outdoor patio behind his Yamaha keyboard and sings his ass off, which isn’t such an easy task — the dude’s heavy, literally. It’s 9 p.m. on a Thursday in…
One day, years ago, Gregory Mcdonald was playing tennis with a man he’d known since they were both 12 years old. It was hot, the middle of summer, and Mcdonald was playing a good game–doing that tricky shit, making with the kind of moves that get under an opponent’s skin…
“Are we gonna play chicken here, Robert? Who’s gonna go first?” That’s Chris Moore talking, from the other end of a cell phone–the preferred means of communication for the Hollywood producer too afraid of standing still. Moore–a producer of Good Will Hunting and the American Pie films, partner with Ben…
If We Were Soldiers smells at all familiar, perhaps you’re confusing it with the stink emanating from a nearby theater screening Black Hawk Down. After all, on their shiny, blood-drenched surfaces, they’re damned near the same movie: Both are based on books that recount true-life battles that claimed the lives…
Just last week, the makers of a film called Pendulum gathered in a brand-new Dallas movie theater to screen their picture. The event was a fund-raiser for both the Susan J. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation’s Race for the Cure and the trust fund for the children of Pendulum co-star Alissa…
“Pray for us.” So ends a note Judd Apatow sent out last week to television critics who have been supportive of his series Undeclared, among the few half-hour comedies to debut last fall with any modicum of acclaim and expectation. Set at a northern California university and populated by awkward…
Maybe this won’t seem like such a big deal to you, since you don’t watch The Education of Max Bickford–which is on CBS Sunday nights. Or maybe you’re one of the 9 million who do, in which case, well, sorry about that. But stay tuned nonetheless, because this small tale…
Or, this year’s fresh Brit hit (so the NME tells us, anyway), meaning those of us who purchased January’s I Heard Myself in You last February from Amazon’s U.K. site, figuring them as the next Coldplay, can now file it away with the rest of London’s letdowns. Seeing as how…
