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I’m not sure, but I suspect that most of us, when we saw our first movie and experienced the thrill of seeing someone so large on the screen, had a moment’s thought something like: I’d like to do that.  I’d like to be in the movies.  And if the movie our parents had taken us […]

When I spoke to Sharon Stone the day before she flew to London to host the 80th birthday celebration for Mikhail Gorbachev at Royal Albert Hall she said she was sore from gardening for 7 hours, attempting to lift a stone Buddha, getting through the thicket of jungle she has for a garden. She said […]

“Ya know ol’ Tom used to frequent this establishment, when he was younger, a’course.” I’m sitting on a bar stool, ale in hand, listening to this grizzly stubble faced grey-haired regular of the last surviving Skid Row bar, the King Edward Saloon, in downtown Los Angeles telling me about drinking with Tom Waits, the multiple […]

I had been friends with Al Pacino for three years when he began shooting Scarface in 1982, and we had had some interesting conversations about his interest in doing a remake of the 1932 Howard Hawks’ film starring Paul Muni.  “I had heard about Scarface for a long time,” he told me. “It was the […]

“I was there as a spectator. But in the heat of it, I jumped on the stage, hoping they would let me eat.” –Takeru Kobayashi, prevented from competing in the July 4th Coney Island Hot Dog Eating Contest, after his release from jail. It wasn’t fair. His fans had come from around the world, hoping […]

When I went to Poland in the winter of 2009 to promote my novel and to serve for the second time as a juror at the Camerimage Film Festival in Lodz, the question most reporters wanted to have answered was what I thought about Roman Polanski.  Polanski, at the time, was under house arrest in […]

Steve Martin is a hard guy to pin down.  Unlike other 65 year-old movie stars, who sit by their pool waiting for their agents to call with the possibility of a job, Martin has single-handedly redefined what someone who has reached the age of official retirement can do if he still has the energy.  Right […]

In 1969, during a summer break from teaching in Ghana, I organized a trip for my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers to East Africa.  About thirty of us flew to Kenya and spent a few weeks exploring the wildlife parks, the meerschaum pipe factory in Arusha, Tanzania, and the pygmies along the Uganda/Congo border. It was […]