LOS ANGELES This is a very small anecdote, but maybe it will lead somewhere. I went to interview Albert Brooks out at his office at Warner Bros. We were going to talk about "Defending Your Life," his new comedy about…
Whoopi Goldberg has collected many words of wisdom over the years. She makes it her practice to go to all those Hollywood fund-raisers with an autograph book, and she sidles up to the heroes of her youth and asks them for…
"He is what we used to call a sympathizer. And he was married to a woman whose brother was active with the Viet Cong."
In a review published in 1984, I wrote that Steve Martin was "an actor who inspires in me the same feelings that fingernails on blackboards inspire in other people." This judgment, sincerely made at the time, was just a tad…
Jim Thompson has been dead for 15 years now, and he never got much notice when he was alive, but all of his books are in print again--with covers showing the broads with low necklines, the desperate guys with their…
NEW YORK -- Woody Allen found the first ticklings of inspiration for "Alice" (opening Tuesday in Chicago at the Fine Arts) by getting a sty in his eye. One of those annoying little bumps by the tear ducts. That was…
He was a large, genial, thoughtful man who was not quite your picture of a big-time Hollywood director. For one thing, he wore a jump suit everywhere he went. He had a closet full of them, in different colors and…
You always know with a Robert Altman film that you'll get some kind of nudge, a dig in the ribs to wake you up and make you think differently. In the days when he was riding high with "M*A*S*H" and…
London had never seen anything quite like the brothers Kray, the sadistic twins who ran a protection empire and palled around with cafe society. They became celebrities of a sort. British professional criminals followed a more genteel tradition until the…
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