Today I am my own subject. Last week I appeared on a podcast called ‘Round 14’ discussing my work, anecdoting a bit on the movie business and talking at some length about my dear friend, the late great Burt Young. The hosts, Tony C. and Ricky B., (their real names)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XS2XRiN9xbE ‘Fedora’ (1978), written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond and directed by Wilder, was the teams penultimate film and for all intents and purposes the more appropriate finish to their legendary partnership than their unfortunate final outing ‘Buddy Buddy’. I saw the film in its Los Angeles first (and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiaNQG7HPpc When I was at the Deauville Film Festival in 2010 I was invited to see a live performance of a German orchestra that specialized in playing music of the 1920s and 30s. With great enthusiasm the person who invited me explained that the front man/singer was a perfect replica
I’ve been re-reading ‘Dino; Living High In The Dirty Business Of Dreams’, Nick Tosches’ majestic biography of Dean Martin. Calling it a bio of Dean, however, is reductive in the extreme; the book is a journey through the dark and relentless birth and progression of the American entertainment industry and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od4y5ekYmYQ&list=PLKjjIa7cwTkIqj4eFYjBYkhe5K7v-DaD- What and when was your first exposure to Monty Python? Mine was in early 1975 but it wasn’t the TV show–it hadn’t yet begun to air on PBS yet (at least not on the Southern California affiliate). Nor was it ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’ which wouldn’t open
He’s a very nice few minutes of Peter Falk discussing his fond memories of his friend and collaborator John Cassavetes. Falk is, as always, magnetic–hard to take your eyes off, insightful, articulate etc. Alas, I directed him in 2003 in a forgettable movie called ‘The Thing About My Folks’ and
When I was a young’un growing up in LA in the mid-seventies I was a serious radio-head. I loved all forms of audio entertainment–live radio talk shows, old vintage comedy shows, KJOI (elevator music non-stop) and even the stray TV channel that you could accidentally find on an obscure frequency.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/v-A2EH0vyd4 Sometimes it’s nice to give a blog a month off. Unfortunately, the silence of the past month was an inadvertent one–I’ve been directing the Bernie Madoff mini-series for ABC, an event that normally I would have blogged to death. For reasons that are a bit murky and not really
I am currently working on two documentary films in addition to my feature projects. For the past two years I’ve been shooting interviews of great performers who came out of cabaret and nightclub backgrounds for a documentary on the history of cabaret. The film–titled “Intimate Nights; The Golden Age of
Sorry for the serious lag in updates, posts, entries, what have you. I’ve been on a major writing roll with my new screenplay and have, literally, been too wrung out from writing every day to post. I took today off so here I am. Plus which I have a story