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The Interviews

Richard Price: Lush Life

Since he was a mere twenty-four, writer Richard Price has been greatly admired for his amazing ear for dialogue, his seemingly seamless writing style and his compelling urban plots.

His new novel, Lush Life (Farar, Strauss and Giroux), about worlds colliding on New York’s contemporary Lower East Side, is just the right Price: a living and breathing thing in your hands. It’s not often that a new Richard Price novel is born, and when you have one, you really have something there.

This new one, like all of Price’s priceless novels (Clockers, Freedomland, Samaritan, The Wanderers, Ladies’ Man,The Breaks and Bloodbrothers) not only doesn’t disappoint, but feeds your Price addiction for stories that only he can tell. There is so much truth, humor and just plain real, that anything else you read afterward feels somewhat artificial and lame.

He is also well-known for his sharp screenplays (The Color of Money, Sea of Love) and has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (quick! Name anybody else who scored this honor.). He also shared an Edgar Award as a co-writer of the acclaimed HBO series The Wire, which is getting huge buzz of late.

Price graciously sat down with me in his not-too-shabby Manhattan brownstone (it’s a long way from his humble, unlikely beginnings in a Bronx housing project, but he earned every square foot of it).

We talk about his eagerly anticipated new book, and we discuss this master writer’s writing process.   As he is – and always has been, since I was fourteen-years-old — my major influence as a writer, I try not to get too Kathy Bates on him. Just the same, I’ll consider our conversation one of the highlight moments of my writing life.  

What attracted you to writing a book about the Lower East Side?

Just about everybody I know with an immigrant background started out there a hundred years ago. For about 25 years, I wanted to write about that. First, I thought about it in a historical mode, but then I realized that it’s the most written-about historical neighborhood in the world.

I would go down there with my kids when they were teenagers. They knew it better than I did, not because of the history but for what it became, with all the clubs. They really didn’t have any notion of the fact that they were the fifth generation and that they are now back where everybody started. So that got me going.

I had no idea what to expect when I went down there. I was still thinking ‘historical.’ And then I just saw all the chaos. And I said, ‘I want to write about this now.’ And not even now, because now is over. It’s like an institution, the new Lower East Side. The new Lower East Side is pretty old. But pump it back a decade, when it was first catching fire.

You said you contemplated setting something in the past, but ultimately dismissed it. Have you ever seriously considered a plot set in the past, other than The Wanderers?

Not really. I’m so obsessive in terms of getting things right, not that there ever is a real right. That’s kind of elusive. It would be too much work for somebody with my kind of brain. It’s very good that I found what was going on now was more than plenty.

I would say that perhaps you are not a person who takes an interest in writing non-fiction.

I’ve done a lot of journalism, but not recently. It doesn’t pay very well and it’s a lot of hard work. I prefer fiction because facts are facts, and they’re facts. In journalism, I did more ‘cultural profiles;’ it wasn’t like real investigative journalism. It was more like interviewing people or taking on a social or cultural phenomenon. That’s not deep journalism. But I prefer to be free-range in my imagination and to see things and to do with them what I want as opposed to be beholden to setting them forth.

Have you ever had the urge to write something that is absolutely out of your realm of understanding?

I’m doing that now. I’m writing a screenplay adaptation of a novel that’s placed in Russia in 1953. It’s called Child 44. It’s a Ridley Scott property. I think the book is going to be coming out in a few months. That’s completely out of my experience. And that’s pretty much why I took it.

How was that for you?

I don’t have the same sort of confidence. But you can’t be beholden to writing fiction and feeling like anything is off-limits. It’s about making things up. I just want to know enough to be able to make things up in a plausible way.

Do you have any career fears?

Well, there are things I haven’t done yet that I probably won’t ever do. It feels like everybody who has ever written a screenplay has directed a movie at some point. I never have and I probably never will. I want to write plays. I did a little bit in the seventies. It’s not like a fear; it’s a regret. I’ll never take on a director role because, in all honesty, I’m not all that interested in that type of job. I would do it simply because it’s the bigger fish up the chain and that it’s the next logical step. But I feel like I’m a writer, and that’s what I do is write.

Are you computer literate? Do you write on a computer now?

Well, this is the first book I haven’t hand written. I’ve never typed anything.

Can you make a living writing books?

I can’t personally. I think there are very few fiction writers who can truly live off fiction without having to either do screenplays or teach or do something. I don’t know that many writers who just sit there and write books, and the ones who Ido are pretty much franchises. They’re best-sellers. It’s a done deal before it’s even written. There are very few serious literary writers, I think. It also depends on where you live and how you live.

You started out in a Bronx housing project and now here you are. Do you think about it a lot, or has it become cliché by now in your head?

No, I feel like because of what I write about, I’m supposed to be living in some walk up or something. I’m not giving it away. I earned it. But I also feel that the worth is in the work, not in the lifestyle of the writer. If the work looks earned, it’s earned.

Now that you live near Gramercy Park, do you obsess on which fork to use and things like that?

No. Listen, the Bronx is where I’m from, and the Bronx is always where I tend to gravitate back towards, when I’m looking for something to grab me in terms of writing. That’s emotionally and literarily where I’ll always be from. But I don’t have to live there. I’ve been living in Manhattan all of my adult life.

I know you are concerned about doing research for your novels. When doing research, when do you feel like enough is enough?

Here is the thing about research. I read this quote, some writer being pithy about the nature of writing: researching isn’t writing, outlining isn’t writing, talking about it isn’t writing; writing is writing. And I feel like that’s true. A lot of this researching and hanging out or being in the field or whatever you want to call it is just procrastination. It’s a hell of a lot more fun for me to be out there soaking things up then me sitting here rearranging the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and feeling like I’m jumping out of my skin all the time. I’d much rather be out there. The isolation, the lack of physicality, and the act of writing where you sit there for a century – I have a hard time with it. I know I have to get to it. I know I’ll invariably spend a lot more time ‘out there’ than I really need to.

But it’s also necessary, isn’t it? To make your novel the best that it can be?

Nick Pileggi [author of Goodfellas] once said when researching his book, Casino: when you get to the point when you ask somebody in the world you’re writing about a question, and in your head, word for word, you say what they’re going to say before they say it, then you know you’re wasting your time and you really need to be writing now. I relate to that very much.

When you travel around with cops and such, do you feel like you’re a pain in the ass to them?

No, the cop thing gets a lot of play, but I hang out with everybody. This book is about a homicide on the Lower East Side. The Lower East Side at this point is six worlds, and the only thing anybody knows about is the historical, Yiddish boomtown and the new bohemian playground. The fact of the matter is, there are heavy housing projects, a lot of tenements, and the realtors haven’t gotten to a lot of the tenements yet. There’s still Hispanic, Dominican. There is a huge Chinese immigrant population, probably the second biggest population down there. Then you have the new bohemians down there who are sort of playing.

I’m trying to take in that world, and it’s like taking in Byzantium. I’ll go with cops because when you go with cops you see things that you would not normally see. It’s sort of like dipping your head below the surface of the water with a snorkel mask on. It’s a whole different experience than if you’re just staring at the water from the sand. Being with the cops is like putting a snorkel mask on.

One of my main characters is a restaurant manager, so I’ll hang out in these restaurants and I’ll go to restaurant managers’ meetings. Another character is a kid in the projects, and here I am again, in the projects. And I’ll go to Community Outreach, guys who work with the Chinese community. There is a lot of illegal housing situations, no documentation. They’re living cheek and jowl, just like the Jews from a hundred years ago.

Everybody thinks the Lower East Side is this yuppy-buppy-schmuppy playground, and it is to some extent, and the prices have gone through the roof, but it’s also black and Dominican and Chinese and Orthodox Jewish. And everybody’s talking about this rehabilitation like it’s this done deal.

Real estate is violence. It’s physical violence, but it’s also uprooting, it’s clashing, it’s tectonic plates. All that stuff is still going on. Everybody thinks it’s rebirth, but it looks more like afterbirth. It’s chaos down there. It’s not a done deal. It’s not like this new Disney Times Square, by any stretch of the imagination.

Are you exhausted from it, now that you’ve completed the novel?

If I go down with journalists, it’s a little bit like you develop a dog-and-pony show after a while. But I’m not going to be doing that.

When I’m working on something, and I know that there is going to be a book at the end of it, there is going to be a lot of anxiety. I’m trying to get at something, so when I’m down there, there is this edge to me, this feeling in my stomach. I’m there to get something and I’m not sure what. So once the book is done, when I go down there now, it’s like a relief. It’s like a done deal. It’s out. Now I’ll go down there, and I’m just like a human being. I’m not like a maniac on a mission.

When you give birth to a book, is there like a post-partum depression?

Yeah. Well, it’s like people who think of themselves as productive always think of themselves as sloths. You keep fantasizing that, ‘man, it’s going to be so different when this thing is done.’

But you give yourself a one-day grace period, and you’re back to breaking your own balls. It’s like ‘what have you done for me lately?’ It’s like, ‘hey, your screenplay’s late.’ Nobody’s saying that to me, but I’m saying that to me. It’s like, if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person.

What is your writing schedule like?

It depends what stage of the process I’m in. The time when I plunge into it first thing in the morning is usually when I’m in a bad place and I’m in a panic.

Does that help you write?

Being in a panic? Not productively, but I’ll put in a lot of sweat. Sometimes when you write, and you go off on a dog leg, and you don’t want to admit to yourself that you’re going off on a dog leg, so you go further out. But some part of you knows that you’re wasting your time; you’re trying to put a square peg in a round hole and you’re wasting all this energy, but you won’t give up.

It’s like you’re running a marathon and you break your ankle, and your response to a broken ankle is to run faster and get it over with. Instead of just saying, ‘stop,’ I’ll spend months going off on a tangent. There are a couple of hundred pages of this book that I cut.

Do you read your books after they’re published?

I’ll read sections. For [public] readings, I’ll use sections that I feel will go over best. It may not be necessarily the best writing, but the best stuff to listen to, because it has the most dialogue or the most momentum.

I just picked up Clockers because they just reissued it a couple of days ago. I’m reading it, and I don’t remember writing it. I don’t remember what happened next. On one hand, I’m reading this and I’m going, ‘how the hell did I know all this stuff?’ On the other hand, I kind of had a red pen in my hand, thinking, ‘cut, cut, cut, cut.’

How about The Wanderers or Ladies’ Man?

I cannot bring myself to read anything from the seventies. Usually, if you get ten reviews, and one of them is bad, that’s the one you remember. That’s the one your mom wrote. The other nine are a blur.

With the early stuff in the seventies, I was in my twenties. I don’t even remember that person, let alone what that person wrote. I was a kid. It didn’t mean that the books didn’t have a certain charisma, that despite the sort of rough writing, it didn’t mean it didn’t have electricity. But I can’t see it. All I can see is, ‘how did I get away with that? How did people fall for that?’

Do you ever feel like you’ve accomplished what you set out to do? Did you “get there?”

I always feel like I’ve never learned how to write a book, because what worked the last time might not necessarily apply to this type of story. And if you try what you did the last time, it might turn out to be a disaster. Every book has its own way of being written. And you get amnesia. You forget that for every book there was a lot of anxiety. There were a lot of revisions. There was a lot of agonizing over ‘is this bullshit or not?’

Somehow, the book wound up in the bookstore and it was okay, but all you wind up remembering is the book in the bookstore. You don’t remember what you were going through yet again. I don’t know how old I have to be before I start remembering that. But I guarantee you that when I write my next book, I’m going to forget how hard this book was.

Do you ever feel like time is going to run out before all your ideas are realized?

Oh, yeah. Absolutely, the older you get. That’s the problem with screenwriting. It’s lucrative and it pays for a lot of my life, but the problem is whether something gets made or not is beyond your control. The older you get, the less patience you have with writing something that might or might not ever see the light of day. You’ll get a lot of dough, much more dough than you would for writing a really good book, but either two writers will jump on after you, or it will never get done, or it will get done despite some cockeyed thing. I want everything to count. I want everything to be the way I wanted it to be.

The minute you finish a book, you can’t ever imagine having an idea for another one. It’s like trying to get pregnant when you are already pregnant. Let the baby come out.

How about The Wire? You’re getting some rave reviews on that.

I feel like I’m just copping a ride on that. I wrote a number of episodes and I love it and I love everybody involved. But it’s really David Simon’s show. It’s based on Clockers, he told me, but he’s taken it way past Clockers. I never got above the streets. He goes all the way to the state assembly. He really gets the big picture.

I knew him from ’92 when Clockers and Homicide were published at the same time. We both had the same editor. We went out together on the night of the Rodney King verdict and they were rioting in Jersey City. We went over to Jersey City to watch the riots.

It was two years into The Wire, which I thought was great and way beyond me, that he approached me to come on board. I didn’t really want to do it because it was too intimidating. I felt the level, the depth and the nuance of The Wire was way past my own natural understanding of things. I thought these guys thought I knew a hell of a lot more than I did.

I had put everything I had into Clockers, and this was way beyond Clockers in terms of panoramic and the real politic of the world. It was like on-the-job training.

Does your mind have to be wired a certain way to write a screenplay?

You have to be geared for brevity and momentum. It’s about speed. You never want to get flaccid in whatever you’re writing. You always want to have some kind of tension, a taunt quality. But it’s imperative in a screenplay, whereas it’s not imperative in a novel.

You can have twenty pages of two people talking on a bench, which is fine in a novel, as long as what they’re talking about is worth reading. That conversation will be about half a page in a script. It’s only so long that somebody is going to fix a camera on two heads talking without any other kind of visual shenanigans.

You have such an amazing ear for dialogue. Do you ever watch something on TV or in film and say, “oh, brother, this is so phony.”

The antithesis of The Wire is Law and Order. Within an hour, you have crime and punishment. What’s good about Law and Order is that it’s plausible, and the good aren’t always rewarded and the bad aren’t always punished, which is great, just like real life. It’s like you get a whole meal in one sitting. There’s a crime, you go right to the trial, even though there must be a nine-month gap in there somewhere that they’re not talking about.

But people have these theatrical breakdowns in the box and lawyers don’t object and people are easily tricked into confessing that they’re secret lovers and this and that. At the same time, the show works. But it’s a different type of meal.

The Wire is like this fifty-course meal, and you get to eat this one piece of sushi every seven days. On Law and Order, they bring it out on one platter, and you can just eat until you’re done.

But every once in a while on Law and Order, every rich person is bad; they’re snooty and rich, but Law and Order is great. The Wire, though, is sort of like anti-television. And that’s David Simon’s doing. He’s more obsessive than I am, because he’s trained as a journalist. He really is obsessed with the pace of how things unfold.

In a way, before the DVD phenomenon when The Wire caught on, the show shot itself in the foot like that, because things would happen on Episode Two of Year One that wouldn’t pay off until Episode Seven of Year Two. Who the hell’s around to go, ‘oh, yeah!’? But he had a vision and he stuck to it and The Wire’s The Wire.

Did you watch The Sopranos?

I love The Sopranos. Some of the episodes were better than others, but that was a happy medium between Law and Order and The Wire. Everything was not that hard to get. The characters were completely vivid and compelling. It was like a slow-motion Godfather.

If you weren’t where you are today, did you ever wonder about where you might be?

Like if I didn’t make it as a writer?

Yes.

I think about that. The main character in Lush Life is me if it didn’t happen. A guy who was in his thirties, who came to the Lower East Side in his early twenties. Like everybody who is there now, he feels like he is going to live forever and he’s going to be an artist and he’s going to make it. And it’s cool to be a bartender because I’m really an actor and it’s cool to be a maitre d’ because I’m really a playwright.

Then, all of the sudden, ten years later, the hyphens start to fall away and he’s just a bartender.

There before the grace of God go I. I don’t know if I would have been a bartender, but I probably would have been one of a trillion lawyers.

This article originally ran in Popentertainment.com

 

Categories
Good Books The Interviews

Linda Ellerbee

We’re always better off when we see the world through Linda Ellerbee’s eyes, and now we’re even more fortunate to get a taste of life with the help of her mouth. That infamous mouth – the one with the trademarked smirk that would wryly remind us “and so it goes” for over twenty years –– the mouth that would often bring TV network and AP Wire executives to a high boil – the mouth that inspired the classic sitcom Murphy Brown – the mouth that now says, “whenever I get into trouble it’s because they quoted me accurately, not inaccurately” is now talking again in her latest book, “Take Big Bites” (Putnam).

It usually doesn’t take much for Ellerbee to open this mouth, and when she does, she intrigues us and draws us into her worldview – a view as dry as it is fertile, and void of pretense. She’s smart and funny to a fault, and her Texas touch has you hog-tied and happy before you even have a chance to disagree with her incredibly good sense. She’s mouthy, for sure – but as often as her mouth is open, so is her soul, her mind and her need to talk to strangers (“As a journalist, I’ve made a darn good living talking to strangers,” she says. “When you talk to strangers, they are not strangers anymore.”).

Here, she shares some incredible and thought-provoking stories of her unique life through her experiences with meals, both good and bad, both memorable and forgettable. It’s a simple idea told simply, but when Ellerbee communicates, it’s like comfort food with deep, rich layers. It goes down easy and leaves you thinking.

In a word: magically delicious.

Mix one-part travelogue with a healthy dash of one-and-only style autobiography (typical chapter title: “No Shit, There I Was”), stir thoughtfully with recipes that actually entertain (“tie a bandanna around your head to catch the sweat” is actually Step #5 when making the Vietnamese dish, Pho) and salt to taste. However, you won’t need to add much, as Ellerbee leaves nothing on the bone regarding her failed marriage, her breast cancer, her frank talk with her bestest Rhinestone Cowgirl girlfriends, raising two children while balancing a career in journalism, and her twenty-year relationship with her unlikely lover and life partner Rolfe Tessem (a man who hates picnics).

There’s a meal – a bittersweet memory – for every one of these tales, which takes us by land and by sea from Vietnam to London to Mexico, with stops in Afghanistan and Houston. In the end, she’s spent and we’re full — there is not a secret left unrevealed, including her recipe for her specialty, down-home Frito Pie.

She says, “In my journals – for whatever reason – I noticed that I had noted meals along the way –and why they were important, and why they connected me to other things in my life. Other than music, nothing takes us back to a place and time quite as quickly as the taste of something. I can taste my mother’s fudge pie and be there with her in her kitchen with her alive. It would take me there.”

One meal at a time, as well as one friend, lover, child, cancer and career milestone at a time, Ellerbee eats her way to an epiphany. She says, “A lot of my life had been about exploring and adventuring in one way or another, whether it being one of the first women on TV news or losing both my breasts or traveling or what have you.”

Our appetizers came in the form of her first two bestsellers (“And So It Goes” in 1986 and “Move On” in 1991). It was a damn long time to wait for a writer this good and a main course this satisfying, and we are hunnnn-gry.

Why so long?

“My day job got in the way,” she replies.  And what a day job it is (and night job as well; in fact, it’s almost 24/8). Her production company, Lucky Duck, offers the Emmy-Award-winning news program for children, Nick News, on Nickelodeon, among other fine projects. It’s the good fortune of children today to have Ellerbee’s no-bullshit take on the news. Because of this, we know that the world will be a slightly better place in the future.

As we learn in her three books, her life had been a series of improbable plot twists and swift kicks in the ass. Her humble Houston beginnings did not seem to be a likely coming attraction for international acclaim and the back-biting business of network news. In fact, it seemed more likely that little Linda Jane would turn out more like Betty Crocker than Diane Sawyer.

She says, “I come from the kind of family that when we are eating one meal, we are talking about the next one.”

It’s one of those stories that would never work as fiction, but Ellerbee tells it better:

“It goes back to my father, who told me I could do anything, I could be anything, and who also persuaded me that a foot in the road is a good place for a foot to be,” she says. “And then I had a high school teacher who told me, ‘You are going to be a writer. You are a writer.’ When I was twenty-seven years old, my husband left me, and I had a two-year-old and a three-year old, and no job and no college degree. I had nothing but the memory of this teacher telling me, ‘You are a writer.’

“So I sat down and I wrote a letter. I thought I wanted to be a journalist. When I was growing up, I loved the movie His Girl Friday. I wrote this letter saying that I would be very good at this. I sent this to every newspaper and wire service in the United States. Television never entered my mind. I got a job with the Associated Press in Dallas, and moved there, and went to work, and was fired about four months later for accidentally letting a personal letter get out on the Associated Press news wire. Of course, in the letter, I shot my mouth off about my boss. They fired me only because they couldn’t shoot me.

“What happened instead is that I got all these job offers. One of them was from KHOU, the CBS television affiliate in Houston, my hometown. I went to work there for eight months, and then was offered a job in WCBS in New York, where I stayed for three years covering – get this – crime and strikes. Then NBC gave me a job to cover… the United States Congress!”

After that perfectly logical and non-ironic transition from crime to Congress, it was on to the legendary midnight cult obsession, NBC News Overnight. This offbeat news program was beloved by 80s college students, rock stars (Crosby, Stills, Nash and the Grateful Dead were devotees) and celebrities (Sammy Davis, Jr. would call in after the show to express his passion for it).

“If the Nielsen’s had rated colleges,” Ellerbee says, “we would probably still be on the air.”

In 1986, Ellerbee co-hosted the greatest television program never watched, called Our World. What made this ABC documentary series exquisite was not just an intelligent, hip and unsentimental look at pop culture and politics, but it was, more importantly, Ellerbee’s take on pop culture and politics. Its cancellation after one fabulous year became America’s loss (America was watching Cosby instead, and did not yet know how to program its VCR.).

Reflecting on her first book, “And So It Goes,” she says, “I never meant to write [it]. That was an accident. Nobody expected it to be a best seller. That was a big accident. I think you have to leave yourself open in life to happy accidents, because Lord knows you’re going to get the other kind. It was an accident that I was a journalist. The rest of my family all had honest jobs.”

From there, it was on to Lucky Duck and a sitcom loosely based on her career.

She says, “[Murphy Brown’s] executive producer, Diane English, told me that she wanted to do a series with Candice Bergen about an anchorwoman whose mouth always got her into trouble and could they follow me for a couple of months. An anchorwoman whose mouth always gets her into trouble? What’s there not to like?”

However, it was not all laugh tracks and group hugs. Her diagnosis of breast cancer in 1992 put her in a rare place – the sidelines – but only briefly. This lucky duck still had a lot of livin’ to do.

She says, “Any life threatening disease changes you. It takes your illusions of immortality, which we tend to live with for as long as possible. It does remind you to stop and smell the flowers. I’m thirteen years out after breast cancer. I have to be careful because unless I consciously stop and think, I will start rushing so fast that I’ll go, ‘whoops, there goes another flower.’ I have to remind myself again that I’m not going to be around forever.”

Her current book has a second motive and message: “’Take Big Bites’ is a life philosophy more than it is about food. Americans have become so afraid of travel, especially traveling outside their own country. And I want them to know that it is safe, and that people may disagree with our government but they may not disagree with you. Maybe after a while we can all stop being afraid of one another.”

This young sixty-year-old also says, “If at any time in my so-called adult life, you had asked me what I would be doing five years from that point, I would have gotten the answer wrong. And it has taken me this long to figure out that that’s okay. This is not the dress rehearsal. This is your life. Get out there and take big bites of it.”

 

This article originally appeared in Popentertainment.com

 

 

Categories
Good Books The Interviews

Vincent Patrick

If you lead a squeaky clean (read: deadly dull) existence, chances are the closest you’ll ever get to an exhilarating, rewarding life of crime is by reading the great works of Vincent Patrick. His two previous novels, The Pope of Greenwich Village and Family Business, have easily become cult classics, testosterone charged with male swagger that’s tough as a fifty-cent steak. If you’re among the sheep reading Grisham and Clancy, get your sorry ass over to the bookstore and demand Patrick instead. What the hell’s the matter with you?

You’ll need to start with his first two novels, which will psyche you for his new one, called Smoke Signals. All three of these rough diamonds glitter with glorious lowlifes, street scum and the most extraordinary of regular people. In every bite, you have your neighborhood toughs and off-center whackadoos, usually caught up in circumstances and schemes that have spun out of control. You never know what’s lying around the corner for these guys, unless, of course you’ve already seen the movie. Needless to say, you’ll be quoting from these characters for the rest of your boring-ass life, while waiting in your express line or standing like an idiot in your morning shower. Vincent Patrick is da man who gave the world such great lines as “dey cut off my tum, Chaa-ley,” “cop shit his pants,” and other delectable quotables.

“Crime attracts me,” he admits in a recent phone interview with me, which, by the way, was a high point of my pointless existence. He says, “I’m always busy trying to present those characters in a way they’re not usually perceived by most people.

“There’s something about that whole kind of outsider hustler thing. I’ve gone out of my way to be around people like that, providing I could keep the right distance. In fact, keeping the right distance is a sort of dance in itself, where you become friendly with some of those guys but you never quite let your guard down to get caught up in it.”

The only real crime Vincent Patrick has committed is procrastination between novels: fourteen years, to be less than precise. Withholding genius like that is a crime on a grand scale. However, his new one, Smoke Screen, is entirely worth the wait. Smoke Screen is Pope on an international stage, with the usual neighborhood joes talking their talk and walking their walk. This time, however, his world expands to include the President of the United States, a Cuban doctor, the CIA, national security and a deadly virus about to be released on an unsuspecting public. I won’t give anything away, but let’s just say that “unpredictable” is describing it mildly.

Patrick says he got the urge to “try a thriller,” which is odd considering that his first two books are two of the most thrilling reads you’ll ever do. He also decided to try biting off more than he can chew (and succeeding) as he expands his stage beyond da neighborhood to places as alien to his characters as The Museum of Natural History. His task included exhaustive research on subjects as diverse as African expeditions, modern day Cuba, and jewel heists.

He describes his research akin to ” an old-time movie where you actually see something that you didn’t know about. Because these days, everything is on television. There’s no place left to go where you’re saying, ‘I never saw that.’ ”

Smoke Screen also takes us into a place that — for the last year, anyway — has been the source of punchlines and monologues: the Oval Office. However, what is transpiring in this story has very little to do with cigars and everything to do with Cuba. “I was most fearful of the whole oval office section,” he recounts. “I was frightened because it was so hard to do in even a mildly believable way. For the first time, I was dealing with characters who allowed me a much more intelligent and somewhat broader knowledge. In the first two books, we’re dealing with people in a much more limited world. Given where they were, it was really people seeing the world from a neighborhood viewpoint. Here, suddenly, there was all this opportunity to begin exploring a lot of factual stuff that you accumulate over the years and attitudes toward life. In one sense, I feel that the pure craft level is the best I’ve done. I’m not sure that the whole novel holds up to the first one because it’s simply not as serious. It was more fun to write in the sense that I was suddenly expounding on all sorts of little things that I didn’t have room for in the others.”

Does that mean that our Vincent has gone Hollywood? After all, he’s also a well-respected screenwriter, creating the scripts for both his novels and helping to create The Devil’s Own, among other credits. Let’s just say that “they’re talking” about bringing Smoke Screen to the Big Screen, and we can only pray that they pay him to write the screenplay.

The Hollywood creative process has left a somewhat bad taste in his mouth, but he has come out largely unscathed. He also claims that the Hollywood stereotypes are correct.

“It’s pretty much what people think it is,” he says. “It’s a business and the people running it recognize it as such. Unless you change the whole scheme of things, then everything flows out of that. To say that it’s outrageous that they don’t put their money into higher quality movies is ridiculous. If your Keough plan owns a lot of Fox stock, are you sure you want them to put a lot of money into so-called quality movies? It just doesn’t happen. The personal morality can be pretty terrible, people can be pretty cutthroat, but it all flows out of a fundamental decision to generate a lot of money. And nobody really knows what will work and what won’t. If they did, they would make money on every movie.”

With cool influences like Nelson Algrin (The Man with the Golden Arm, Walk on the Wild Side) and Joseph Conrad, Patrick knew he was going to be a novelist since the fifth grade. Of course, he first took a necessary detour into the real world, trying his hand at everything from bartending to engineering. This is, I think, what separates real men like Patrick from lightweight hacks like John Updike, who claims to never have had a real job in his entire life. Patrick’s characters have a workaday realism to them, smelling of everything but fruity literary pretension. It’s as if they have all had their share of punching the clock.

He says, “From early on, I always assumed that I would never earn a living at writing. I assumed that you weren’t even supposed to. This was back at a time when if a book was on the bestseller list, it was considered garbage, that it couldn’t possibly be good. I just assumed that what you did was go out and work and got a lot of experience and saw life and earned some money.”

He was published for the first time in his early 40s (“It all flipped at once,” he recalls. “It all came crashing in with the both the movie sale and the paperback sale.”).

The Pope of Greenwich Village — both the novel and the movie — caused a minor sensation when it was unleashed in 1979 and 1984, respectively. Unfortunately, I have a bit of devastating news to Pope-heads: don’t hold your breath for a Pope sequel. Sorry. Buck up and move on.

“I always thought of sequels as kind of crass commercialization,” he says. “I never for a minute had any intention of [writing a sequel]. I don’t see the sequel waiting. It’s funny how people immediately read stuff in.”

In the fourteen years since he’s been gone, a lot has changed in the publishing business. He says, “More than ever, there’s an overwhelmingly large amount of competition out there. The number of books that keep pouring out is endless. Your window of doing something is so brief. It’s very hard for a book to get out and sit for a while and develop a following at any easy pace. It’s like movies: they open a movie on a weekend and on Monday they tell you if it’s a hit or a failure and here’s how long it’s going to be around. Publishing is heading in that direction too.”

That’s where it’s up to us, kids. Let’s make sure Vincent Patrick stays around for a long time. He admits that another, smaller novel is in the works (“but I haven’t quite gotten the right handle on it yet.”). Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another fourteen years for our next thrill.

This article originally appeared in Popentertainment.com.

 

 

Categories
The Interviews

Tom Verica: Adventures In Shondaland

If the chances of making it in Hollywood are about as sure a thing as shooting craps, Tom Verica is currently throwing consective sevens, and an admiring and growing crowd is gathering around the table.

Of course, it took the Philly native about 20 years to hop on this hot streak, but you’ve seen him all over the damn place: Among many other projects, he was Bill Castroverde on LA Law, Dick Gordon in From the Earth to the Moon, Kyle Moran in Providence, and the doctor who discovers the tube of fungicide medication in Elaine’s medicine chest on Seinfeld.

It seemed like a cinch that producer Shonda Rhimes, TV’s newest and most respected creative force, would tap Tom for her TV drama empire. Upon landing in ShondaLand (the name of her production company), he planted a flag on some impressive career ground: He’s giving new definition to the term “playing dead,” appearing (and disappearing) as recent-Emmy-winner Viola Davis’ late husband on How To Get Away With Murder.

The difference, and it’s a big one: In addition to his Murder gig, he’s serving as co-executive producer for Shonda’s other blockbuster, Scandal. And he’s established a Plan B+ career for himself as one of TV’s go-to directors (the long list includes Private Practice, The Mentalist, Ugly Betty, and Boston Legal).

Yo, Tom, what are you going to do next? Disney World?  Or at least crawl into a hammock and maybe take a short nap?

“I always have my eye on the next step, the next level,” he tells me in a recent call from LA. “But with that said, I do feel incredibly fortunate to have my cake and eat it too. That’s in regards to working on a show that I truly enjoy creatively, and executive producing and directing. And on the same lot, right next door, being able to work as an actor opposite Viola Davis. If you can write down what scenario would be great…”

Well, he pretty much just wrote that scenario, rather accurately. As far as acting, he’s done plenty, but directing is a whole new animal.

“Directing is not easy, but it’s thrilling and challenging,” he says. ” [It requires] the ability to change up and navigate. Some episodes are thrillers, some episodes are dark comedies, some are flat-out action and drama. As a director, that excites and challenges me. It really gives me the freedom to play in the sandbox, in different genres. I call it riding the bull. You get on and stay with it and not try to control too much of where it’s going. You have to be willing to go where the script takes you.”

Rhimes’ scripts, and her ShondaLand production company, are taking Tom on a wild bull ride, and look how he’s holding on. In 2014, ABC happily gave over its entire Thursday primetime lineup to ShondaLand dramas: Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder

“It’s the mark of her talent,” Tom says, regarding the reason Rhimes plugs into audiences, in an age where attention spans are dwindling. “I think she taps into more than just a female market. I think she managed to navigate into different types of drama. She makes it seem effortless. She really has her finger on the pulse of how people are thinking and what they are going through. It transcends normal and basic relationships. She asks a lot of questions and mixes it with some humor. It’s very difficult to do, and to pull off in a landscape where there are so many options. She’s really in a groove and it’s exciting to be around.”

Tom may know a little bit about navigating relationships too. He and his wife, Kira Arne, have a marriage that offers something unique in Hollywood: mileage.

“We’ve been married for fifteen years, and in Hollywood that’s about 75 years,” he says. “My wife — not that it’s important, but since we’re talking about this — is African American. We don’t lead with that. We attribute the success of our marriage to communication and working through issues. We’re not dealing the way interracial couples in the Sixties had to deal, and it will be different for our kids when they get older, but at the core of it, it’s built on love and respect for one another. She makes me better, smarter, and more talented with the challenging nature of who we are as people. It’s such an alive and spirited partnership that we constantly feed off of one another, in a good way.”

Seems like Tom is multitasking his career in a good way too.

 

This article originally ran in Everybody’s magazine.

 

 

 

Categories
The Interviews

Katrina Bowden’s FitKat Blog Shows You The Way

The time has come to hand over our lives to Katrina Bowden. Her new blog, FitKat, shows us more than just how to get a beach body and avoid sweets. The astounding thing about Katrina is that — as awesome as she looks — she’s actually just like us: she likes cake.

Her blog — with lifestyle, fitness, nutrition, beauty and travel advice, complete with relatable anecdotes — gives us what we need and what we don’t know we need: someone to tell us it’s okay to mess up and make mistakes.

On 30 Rock, Katrina played Cerie, the skinny intern who, due to her flawless perfection, unintentionally got on Liz Lemon’s bad side and was like catnip to the male staff.  In her blog, she shows us that Cerie was merely a role she played (and rather well), and that Katrina offers dimensions proving that beauty is deeper than skin deep. And even Katrina loses her luggage at airports, just as if she were us!

Here, we pick Katrina’s brain about a few of her blog topics so far:

Let’s start with a subject that many people don’t think about until it’s too late: losing luggage while traveling! Is it best to just travel lightly, say with just a carry on, for instance? 

It’s important to be aware that sometimes things go wrong. You don’t need to always just bring a carry-on. You just need to survive with a carry-on if your bag gets lost.  I’ve had multiple experiences where my bag has been lost. I’ll say, why does this happen to me, but it happens. Maybe I just check in a little too late and forget it.

I’ll often be stuck with things in my carry-on bag that I don’t really need, or just my computer or chargers and that’s it. And I’m stuck without any change of clothes or a different pair of shoes, or things like that. So I decided that I really need to pack smartly, with the essentials that I would need to survive for a couple of days, in my carry-on.

The whole thought of this came when I would go to award shows with 30 Rock, basically every year. It was important for me to take my makeup and shoes and the dress I was going to wear on the plane with me. Because if my luggage got lost, the next day I wouldn’t have any of the stuff that I needed.

When I pack, I’m sometimes in this whirlwind and I start throwing things in a bag, with no organizing pattern, and I’ve been trying to fix that.

You can always go to a CVS and get some toothpaste or get some clothes that can last you for a couple of days. I don’t know, I’ve never been very satisfied with those [clothing] purchases. I’ll be doing it in a rush, just to have something to wear. And it’s also a waste of money and a waste of your time. When you land in a certain city for whatever you’re doing, you don’t want to have to go out and buy all these things just because your bag was lost. You want to enjoy yourself and spend money on things you’d rather be doing, like going out to dinner or doing something fun in that new city.

It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it’s good to be prepared.

Speaking of travel, how was your recent trip to Costa Rica?

It was my first time there. The country is so different. They have the rain forest and these beautiful beach towns. There are jungle areas where there are lots of wild animals. It’s a really, really cool place.

Ironically enough, my bag was lost going to Costa Rica, and the country is pretty big and some of the roads aren’t paved properly, so getting places takes a long time. My luggage was lost on that trip and we didn’t get it until four days later. But what was great was that I packed my little carry-on and I had my essentials.

We went ziplining in the rainforest. It was totally exhilarating. I’ve gone ziplining before, but doing that in the jungle was the best time. It was drizzling too, so that enhanced the thrill of it. It was really beautiful.

You’ve also ran in two New York marathons — so far! What was your experience like? 

I always loved running and I love a physical challenge. I try to do the most challenging thing that I can. I have a friend who ran the marathon the year before, and I was inspired by her story.

The training period for the New York marathon is over the summer. You train through the summer months and then you run the race in November. I found myself with free time that I didn’t know I had, for a couple of months. I decided to use this opportunity to do something crazy and different. So I signed up, and then a week later, I was doing my first training run.

Was there any remorse? Saying to yourself, “What am I doing? What am I getting myself into?”

All the time! At the beginning, yes, because it was so unknown to me. Even when it became more familiar and I got better at it, I would go on long training runs and I would say to myself, why am I doing this? Nobody is forcing me. I’m running 15 miles right now and it hurts. Nobody is making me do this. I think, as a runner or a racer, you feel that way often, but I also think the feel-good part of running trumps those other times.

How has running — and training for marathons — changed you as a person? 

I’m very impatient, and running takes a lot of patience. I live in New York, and everything is so fast-paced. Running for me helped me calm down. I would go for a run and if there was something going on in my life or something I was concerned about, I would just think it over. I think having those moments where you can just be with your own thoughts is important. You don’t really get that often in this day and age.

What do you experience when you finish running a marathon?

I ran two. My first run, when I finished it, was the best feeling ever. I was so excited when I finished it. I was so proud. I started crying when I was coming to the end, not because I was in pain, but because I was really excited and proud of myself. It’s emotionally overwhelming: people cheering for you and seeing the finish line. And just knowing it’s almost over is a really good feeling. It was such a happy day and I had such a good race. And I loved it so much that I did it again the next year.

You’re a New Yorker, so finding time to meditate and relax is important, as you point out in your blog. 

It’s not easy for me to find that relaxed meditative state. I’m constantly thinking of things. I have friends who can go to yoga and feel so relaxed and let things go. I have a harder time letting things go. For me, just walking around New York City can be stressful sometimes. There is a lot going on. There are a lot of people who maybe aren’t in the best mood. You encounter it all.

For me, just in my everyday life, even if I’m annoyed at something or something rubbed me the wrong way, I try to look past it and think positively. I try to smile at people and hold the door open. I try to observe things and not just worry about myself. It may sound kind of cheesy and weird, but I think if you just have a happy outlook and try to think in a happy way, it will make you actually feel happier.

Of course, I find fitness a great way to let go. I exercise very often. I think it’s a great way to free your mind and let yourself be at ease.

Sometimes I’ll go to yoga class and I’m so zen and I’m so in the moment. But then sometimes my mind just won’t quiet down. There is a give and take. You won’t always achieve that perfect relaxed state of being. We’re always pulled in different directions. But we can focus on just calming down and realizing that some things are just out of our control. You just have to try to be happy.

I guess people feel that models and actors who look like you barely even touch food, but your blog shows you to be a genuine foodie. 

I love food. I love eating. I love cooking too, and I found that I’m pretty good at it. So I have to find ways to make bad food good for you — cooking in a way where it is not as good as the bad version, but it will hold you over. So I like to figure out ways to make my favorite foods a little bit healthier. But I also just really like healthy foods as well.

There are times where I just want to eat a whole giant cake, and I can’t do that. But I don’t think you can really deprive yourself. There were times where maybe I deprived myself more than I maybe should have. It usually backfires, and I think it backfires with everybody. If you’re so strict, it’s going to backfire at some point.

So you should maybe allot one day or one meal a week where you can order the burger and fries. Or if you are out with friends, share dessert so that you can all get a taste of it. Moderation is fine and good and I think it’s healthy.

Is there any type of cooking that you haven’t yet tried that you would like to try? 

I really love Thai food and I’m not really well versed in it at all. I really love the different Thai flavors, and I haven’t really worked with a lot of them, so I would really love to learn Thai cooking.

Finally, how’s Puffin [Katrina’s Pomeranian]? He makes regular appearances on your blog and in your social media. In fact, he has his own Instagram page

I love him. He’s so cute.

 

 

Follow Katrina’s blog here.

Follow Katrina on Instagram.

 

This article originally ran in Everybody’s magazine.

Categories
The Interviews

Thierry Pepin

Spoiler alert: if you want to keep the exotic mystique of New-York-based model/entrepreneur Thierry Pepin intact, don’t read on.

Thierry is not like the usual men menu of hunks, himbos, weightlifers and assorted Zoolanders you scroll past on your Insta. You’re not going to find the same old: the cheerful life philosophies, posing with overly worked-out girl fiends and ‘roided gym buds. Thierry is not going to share with you the best way to prepare tofu or offer you a warm good-morning smile of patented pearly whites exuding wholesomeness and healthy fun.

Fuck that. Those feeds are a nickel a dozen. Thierry’s feed will actually feed you. His is a darker collection of images, reaching down to the deeper fish, a more sinister, earthly lust that doesn’t suggest that you are going to take him home to mother for Thanksgiving, the kind of photos that make you question your choices and why you suddenly feel so funny inside.

We see Thierry move — almost slither — through New York, and other uneasy locales. His smiles are rare, but not altogether absent, and when they happen, you’ve really got something there.

He answers my question before I ask it:  “People ask, ‘how can you be so free?'” His answer:  “Don’t limit yourself to anything.”

Even his tatts — the fad that refuses to fade — are unique and worthy of closer contemplation and study.

“It’s getting weird because I’m kinda liking [the pain],” he says of the inking process. However,  “I’m not going to cover another part of my body. I don’t want anything on my back. My back, that’s where you get your wings. People like character. If you have a nice tattoo, it says a lot about you. A message.”

So the back remains naked, strong and bold, like his backstory: he’s French Canadian. He grew up in a large family in Montreal. Mom was a waif-like model, and she was 39 when she gave birth to triplets (Thierry among them).  One of them died, leaving Thierry as a twin.

“My brother said to me, ‘you are the only person I know who makes decisions by following your heart,'” he says. “‘You just trust your heart,’ my brother says. If my heart is not in it, I don’t know how to hold onto it.”

They were outside people: boats and skis. He traces his heritage back to the Vikings.

About high school, he says, “I could fit into any crowd.” A future forecast, for sure.

Dad, a handsome salesman, left when Thierry was 12.

“My parents together, they were like trophies,” he says. “They were beautiful and on top of their game.”

The relationship with his father? Thierry puts it like this: “My father said, ‘I can’t be your father, but I can be your friend.’ But I’m not sure that’s the kind of guy I would pick as a friend. I outgrew him a long time ago.”

His claim to fame was not his name but that face — and that bod — gracing catalogs and other instruments that the fellas would turn to, to crank one out and load up on undergear. He looks good in underwear. He’s comfortable in his own skin, and even many models, whose stock and trade is the ease of movement and expression, can’t reach that kind of Zed card Zen.

“It doesn’t matter how hot you think you look.” he says. “Nobody cares to see the same face and the same pose on Instagram every day. Instead, what’s your message?”

His message, or at least one of many:  I Do Me.

It must be true, because it’s branded on his website. It’s the name of his new fashion brand.

Selling out? Or just extending the persona he is?

“I’m not compromising who I am,” he promises. “I don’t fake it. There’s no reason.”

The difference between being a younger model and an older model?

“When you’re older, they want to put clothes on you,” he says. He still must be considered younger then.

He’s been in New York City for ten years, in a small but amazing downtown apartment that you would die for, decorated with care and passion by Thierry himself, filled with works of art and about a hundred million tokens of affection from friends and travels.

“They say about New York, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere,” he says, “but to tell you the truth, put me anywhere, and I’m sure I would make it.”

Lotsa photographs come from places that don’t look anything like Manhattan, though. He says, “If I’m going to travel, give me a reason.”

Drinking? Only champagne.

The party image?  “I’m a party boy, but I know most times when to leave the party.”

You would think otherwise.

“I’m in New York but I don’t go out that much,” he says, “but I am inspired by the energy. New York may not be what it once was, but the world was not what it once was. Find your own. Make your own world.”

Part of the world he is making for himself includes producing a midnight boot camp. Part intense workout/part club scene; it’s fitness for 24-hour party people. Spin class at midnight, while a DJ spins too.

He doesn’t strike you as materialistic, so with that in mind, his most cherished possession?

“My books of poetry [that I write],” he says. “I should publish it, because if this house burns, I’ll be crying. When you can’t really make sense of something, you can always go to your feelings. It doesn’t matter how bad the feeling was, after I write it down, I feel good.”

His soul: old.

“I want to create, but it’s not about me,” he says. “If it’s about me, it’s not going to be enough. It’s about giving back. Whatever that positive energy is, that’s what I want to see and live.”

Get a glimpse into that old soul with a sampling of his poetry. This, by the way, is a rare treat.

Whats Up Grown Ups

Do we get better with time

Or do we settle for less?

Do we get to grow like our heroes

Or do we become regular people?

Do we still dream eyes wide open

Or do we give up into the darkness of our traps?

Do we still hope for better days

Or do we surround ourselves to the shadow of our past?

Tell Me Grown Ups

Do we regret people

Do we regret unfinished roads

Do we ever feel too old?

When do we learn about silence

Does it get easier to leave behind

Do we ever learn to free our Mind?

Tell Me

Do We remember who we Used to be

The zest of our soul and how we dared to live?

Do we Love ourself again ,

After looking thru the shattering glass of our youth?

Tell Me

Does it get better or is it always the same

Do we win or lose the game?

Tell Me Grown Ups

When should we give-up?

Do we ever learn to say Goodbye?

Do we ever learn ..

Tell Me Grown Ups

Does it ever Stop?

T

Find out more about Thierry and follow his blog here.

Follow Thierry on Instagram.

Check out I Do Me

Photo credits:

Cover:  Marco Ovando for Chongo Magazine

 

This article originally appeared in Everybody’s magazine.

Categories
Good Books The Interviews

Chris Hayes: Twilight of the Elites

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes explains the decay of authority in America, and why you’d better step up.

This first decade of the 21st century has been glorious (think ipod and 30 Rock), but it’s also going down as one giant sorry-ass fuck-up.

Let the sad list begin: 9/11, Enron, Iraq, Afghanistan, New Orleans, the housing bubble,  the steroid problem in major league sports, the church scandal and The Great Recession.

Chris Hayes

Who’s accountable? Our ruling class, who have failed us big time, that’s who. And yet, despite the traffic jam of tragedy, the ruling class has escaped accountability. Who is being run out of town on a rail? No one. The elite is smart, but they’re also stupid – clueless too. And they let us down. End of story.

In his brilliant/scary book, Twilight of the Elites [Crown Publishing Group], MSNBC’s Chris Hayes neatly sorts out the mess, explaining how the slow decay of leadership and responsibility festered due to greed, smugness and worse. He also offers solutions as to how we need to sweep clean and start anew.

Here, he puts it into plain talk, explaining how the elites went dark and the country dimmed out.

Hey, Chris, define elite.

The word elite is a very contested word in American politics. Over the last few decades, the Right has been pretty successful in redefining what the word means. The way that it is often used, particularly by conservatives, is to describe people who have a certain set of cultural attributes or even consumer choices. You drive a Prius. You drink Starbucks lattes. You sip white wine. Or you live in San Francisco or the West Village of New York. You read The New York Times. But that’s a pretty sociologically poor definition.
First of all, it grabs too large a number of people to really be meaningful. So my father and Henry Kissinger would be labeled under the same [definition]. And it also deviates in a very important way from what the historical understanding of what the word means — that was shared for over a century by both the Right and the Left.

And that is defined by the power they have rather than by their cultural attributions. That is a relatively small group of people who exert a disproportionate influence over society’s direction. CEOs, major media figures.

Was the older elite better than the current elite?

I want to avoid a certain kind of nostalgia: [the idea that] the previous elite was better because they had a certain set of characteristics that made them superior. I don’t really go for that. I think the last set of elites had their own problems.

In your book, you refer to meritocracy. What exactly does that mean?

Meritocracy is a new name for an old American ideal. It’s an ideal of social mobility and the American dream. Only in America, a place that did not have the feudal inheritance of Europe, did people rise to any station that their talents and drive would take them. Benjamin Franklin, for instance. Meritocracy is a current incarnation of the American dream. It specifically says that we are not going to bar entrance to the American elite based on religion, race, geographic location or sexual orientation. All sorts of people from all walks of life will compete on what’s called a level playing field. Through a series of competitions, they will come to the smartest, most capable members of the elite.

 

Twilight of the Elites

You also label 2000-2010 The Fail Decade. Please explain.

We’ve seen an uninterrupted cascade of institutional corruption and incompetence over the last decade. You start with 9/11, and then go into the largest corporate bankruptcy of all time, represented by Enron. But Enron has been so overshadowed that it almost seems quaint to mention [compared to the war in Iraq], the worst foreign policy disaster in a generation, costing over a trillion dollars, thousands of American lives and probably 100,000 Iraqi lives.
This is followed by the spectacle of an American city drowning live on national television. Followed by the largest housing bubble and the worst financial crisis in 70 years. And that’s just the short version. We can go on: what happened in the church, or with the Big Three automakers; newspapers imploding around the country. Now we have major American cities that don’t even have a daily newspaper.

This is not doing much for our trust of the ruling classes.

We don’t have a belief in self-correction because we have not seen self-correction. And that is at the heart of what I call the crisis of authority in America. Because we had such a cascade of uninterrupted corruption and failure, we don’t trust the institutions. It’s radically destabilizing for the way we go about conducting our public life, when all the sources of authority that we look to be anchors for the world don’t function that way.

What are some of the specific ways the elite failed?

The two specific monumental crises of the decade —  and the source of the feeling of exhaustion and cynicism that the country is mired in — are the Iraq war and the financial crisis. In both cases, what you saw was an elite consensus – not a total consensus, but a lot of elites essential arguing for and supporting ideas that have proven to be preposterously destructive.

We’ve had all sorts of people in high places saying that there was no housing bubble. There is a tremendous amount of false consensus. We as the public use a reliance on consensus as a rough indicator of reliability and truthfulness. If it seems like the people in charge are all saying  x, there is a tendency to believe x. The aftermath of people in charge saying x, and x turning out to be not just false but destructively false, means that now we listen with a much more skeptical ear. And it makes it hard to go about forming your beliefs and opinions.

So, Chris, what do we do?

The first thing we have to do is just recognize the profound cost and the negative consequences of this social model we’ve adopted. It’s not producing the American dream that we want. So we need to question that model that we’ve adopted because it’s not working.

The second aspect of it is being more forthright about making the society more equal. The first step is reducing the extreme and extremely pernicious form of accelerating inequality we have. The question is: does the political power exist to make that happen? And that’s the big open question.

You’d better devour this book today.

 

Categories
The Interviews

The Property Brothers Claim Their Ground

These identical twins have the 1-2 punch of real estate and renovation.

Try to tell The Property Brothers apart. It’s easier than you think. Don’t look at their pretty faces – focus on the color of their collars. Jonathan is blue collar, a licensed contractor who rocks the renovations. Drew, the white-collar bro, is the real estate maven who scans the world for fixer-uppers and makes with the negotiating.

Together, these hotties have one of the hottest shows on HGTV since its debut in 2011. The renovate-to-flip series is a major ratings getter in North America, and broadcast in over 30 countries. The siblings can hear themselves dubbed into everything from Hungarian to Chinese, but at the end of the day it’s all about one common universal language.

“We really care about helping the people we are working with and educating the viewer,” Jon says, “but we are also down to earth. We like to have fun. We like to goof off.”

Not a huge order for these guys, whose camera-ready looks have graced the TV screens of their native Canada since they were mere tots (there is an older brother, J.D., who is also in the biz, as a writer).

“When we were coming out of high school, we didn’t want to be starving actors,” Jon says. “So we decided to invest in real estate.”

Smooth move. Their current series is meant to open doors (and double-sided windows too) to the possibilities of impossible houses.

“People who are watching it are looking for ideas,” Jon says. “We hold ourselves to very high standards. We raise the bar in everything that we do. These are the things that I would do in my own house.”

Growing up together, show business easily beckoned on the horizon, but a real estate empire was ultimately in the cards.

“My dad was always very handy,” Drew says. “And if our parents popped out for a few hours, we would rearrange the entire space to something we thought was more functional. We just had a knack for it.”

It’s all about creating visuals as well as creating magic, and fate dealt them a winning hand.

“Jonathan, he’s an illusionist,” Drew says. “When he was younger, he was ranked one of the top professional illusionists in North America. He won a competition. Jonathan used to build all his own illusions. That’s what got him really hands on with building and design. And he expanded from there into properties. We were never focused on just making money or just renovating a place. We were looking at both the finance side of it and the construction side of it.”

Property Brothers

The beginnings were slightly above humble, but it started the climb.

“Our very first property we bought for only $250 down,” Drew says. “It was out of pocket, and it was a $250,000 home across from The University of Calgary. After a short period of time, we sold it for a $50,000 profit. That’s when the light bulb went on. We focused on being smart on the financial side, and being smart on the renovation/design side too.”

Today, the boys make their home in Las Vegas. Wait, Vegas? You mean the market that took quite the beating during the recent crash and was left for dead?

“When we first started investing in the States, we looked at all the major markets and what had been affected the most,” Jon says. “We discovered that Vegas had the most potential for a rebound. When we first went in, we were buying properties for $25-30,000. These were four-bedroom homes, just really beat up. And we went in, fixed them all up, renovated them. Our philosophy has been that the nicest rental combinations have the most reasonable price, and to have tenants who are dedicated to keeping the place well maintained. We’ve seen appreciation on every single property.”

Like they say about Vegas, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. And as far as advice in succeeding from the guys who have made it where others have failed?

“Do not over-renovate,” Jon says. “You need to work with a good real estate agent who understands the market and knows exactly who the buyers are in that community. Each community is different. Every city has its own market, and within a city there are many [sub] markets. You need to understand what buyers are looking for in that area. If this is a first-time-buyer community, don’t spend all your money on putting in granite counters or quartz counters. The buyers are not going to pay you extra for that. They’re going to love it, but it’s not going to get you more money. Ask yourself: is it something that is going to add value to the home or is it something that is going to help the home sell faster but won’t get you any more money?”

Drew adds, ”You need to be prepared. You need to have all your ducks in a row and your financing arranged. Understand your situation. Know where your income is at now. Know where you future income is going to be if it’s going to change. Make sure you budget for what you can afford.”

He adds that you should not be shy about inspecting the biggest commitment of your life.

“This is a huge investment,” he says, “so you have the right to kick the tires. When you are doing an inspection of a home, look behind every piece of furniture, pull up the rug, look at the floor, because you know the seller is [going to put a piece of furniture in front of it]. Even though you are supposed to disclose everything, people don’t. Instead of a regular home inspection, bring in a contractor to do an estimate on all the work. It’s like a free inspection because contractors will do a written quote for free. So it’s like having a second inspection on the whole place.”

Property Brothers

With The Property Brothers help, many people have realized their American dream both on and off the screen. All in a day’s double duty for the twins.

Jon says, “There is so much you can do that doesn’t cost a lot but can really give that ‘magazine look’ to a property, that can give you that dream feel. We are getting people their dream homes within their budget. We see people look at their house and smile. All the people we work with on Property Brothers are people who otherwise would never have gotten into their dream home. These are people who have tried to sell their home because they want something better for their family, and we show them how. Just a little creativity and knowing when to use professionals. The biggest reward for me is when people give me a hug and say, ‘You’ve really helped our family.’”

Find out more about The Property Brothers here and like them on Facebook here.

Drew on Twitter: @MrDrewScott
Jonathan on Twitter: @MrSilverScott

Photos by Harley Reinhardt

Categories
The Interviews

Alison Victoria – Crashing Kitchens and Changing Lives

Can’t stand the heat? Let this DIY star get you out of your kitchen – while she crashes it.

Careful now, Alison Victoria. The kitchen is the most sentimental room in the whole house, and here you come with your big old sledgehammer, making mincemeat.

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Your DIY series, Kitchen Crashers, is a huge hit, and that’s because of the ingredients you so carefully prepare: knowing your client, keeping it simple, and making it happen.

This Chicago native made her mark in Las Vegas, as a designer at a casino’s semi-custom residences. That led to boutiques, resorts and television, as well as a creative director gig at the Silverton Casino Hotel in Vegas.

It was there where she oversaw a $160 million expansion. It’s here where she tells us her secrets of her success.

Alison, remember to breathe! You are busy as a bee!

Up until a year ago, I was running my own firm, I was a VP of marketing at a Las Vegas hotel, and I was doing a TV show. And I crave that. My biggest pet peeve is when people say how busy they are.

Now?

I’ve scaled back a bit and found different avenues to get my designs out there. I’ve diverted my attention to things that are more obtainable, but I love everything that I’m doing.

So design is your true first love.

I’m more focused on the interior design: the fabrics and the lighting. I got to see so much evolution of design in Las Vegas. I got a sense of what I loved and what I wanted to focus my energy on.

I get excited about fabric, and that crosses over into fashion as well. Whether it’s $5 at TJ Maxx, or $180 a yard for my client’s pillows, I am drawn to it and I love it. I don’t think I would have been into it if I hadn’t moved from Chicago to Las Vegas.

So designing a casino brought you closer to your passion.

I was at the casino everyday, designing and piecing together different parts of the puzzle.   Before I knew it, I was leading 900 people in believing in the change that I wanted in this culture. I had to trust them and they had to trust me. It was the craziest journey I’ve ever been on.

Even crazier than TV?

My TV experience is crazy on a different level. I never aspired to be on television. I was doing something that was foreign to me. The TV show came right at the tail end of [my casino experience].

I’ve changed everything in such a positive way. The retention rate was higher, the culture was better developed and working. So the TV series was the next crazy experience that I thought I was never going to be able to do.

Would Kitchen Crashers be a different show if it were hosted by a man?

I by no means would say I’m a feminist but I definitely have feminist tendencies. I always want to prove that women can do it just as good as men, and sometimes better.

The psychology of [Kitchen Crashers] is very different. It’s all about psychology. It’s all about reading that person and knowing what they want.

So I brought that to the brand. I brought a sense of compassion, a sense of design, versus full-time contracting and framing and electrical and power tools.

I made it more about the space planning and the color scheme and the textures and the finishes, not so much about the actual construction.

What are some of your Kitchen Crashers challenges?

A kitchen is a kitchen is a kitchen. You have cabinets, countertops, appliances, and a backsplash. And you can never take that away from that space, but you can enhance it, and you can really tie it into a family, based on knowing them, knowing how they live, knowing how they use the space. I think I bring a different mind into it.

Again, it’s psychology. I think this is going to look best based on what you want. I’m going to give you what you want, but I am going to do it the right way.

Maybe you like the color red, but maybe I think it’s too aggressive for the space. There is a way to incorporate the color without tying you into it for the rest of your life.

It’s being smart about using color. Let’s do it so that it’s a win-win situation. You’re going to get what you want and I am going to be able to do it the right way and everybody’s happy.

Crashing a kitchen is especially difficult, given families’ attachment to them.

After 65 kitchens and counting, it’s not just about doing a show and it’s not just about delivering a product for the network. It’s about changing people’s lives.

Your kitchen is going to be way more valuable, and I don’t just mean on the profitability. Think about the memories people have in their kitchens: cooking for their kids or their very first home or trying to be a real chef for your new husband; all the people congregating into that space no matter what you are doing. People will always be in the kitchen. Always will be. Always have been.

How in the world do you even get started on crashing a kitchen?

Homework is my biggest part when it comes to designing any space, because of all of the wonderful things we have at our fingertips, like Pinterest.

A photo can do so many things. If you send me a look-book of everything that you like, that’s going to let me into your life.

That’s going to let me see what you love.

I’ll pick your brain just by hanging out with you. I spend a lot of time with my clients before we even get to the design stage. I want to know all about them.

I’m blessed with the ability to visualize a space. Walking into some crappy kitchen? I don’t see that. I see potential. And I think that’s true with people as well as spaces.

If there is potential, I love it. I don’t need to look for somebody who is so perfect at everything. I’m interested in somebody who has the potential to be great, because you can mold them and shape them into that great person. It’s the same thing with space. You can walk in and see ugly, but I always walk in and I see potential.

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Find out more about Alison Victoria here.

Categories
The Interviews

Say Anything, Jeff Dye. We’re Listening.

With a list of TV credits and a growing following, Jeff Dye’s career goes boom!

 

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By Ronald Sklar

Photography by Harley Reinhardt

 

By rights, he is way too good looking to be funny, but there he is, that adorable Jeff Dye, making us laugh as if he was your typical plain-Jane standup.

He was a top finalist on NBC’s Last Comic Standing, then he embarked on a 50-city comedy tour with the other show winners. Comedy Central happily handed him his own special, and TBS invited him to perform at its comedy festival in Chicago. He was a regular on ABC’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (as the funny guy who suggested ideas to the interior decorators) and he took top prize at the Giggles Laugh Off in his hometown of Seattle.

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Recently, he was be seen as host of MTV’s hilarious hit Money From Strangers, making everyday people do wacky things for dollars (think of it as a longer, greedier, more perverse version of “what would you do for a Klondike Bar?”).

“It’s all done in fun but it’s a little bit more pesky,” he explains. “We don’t get corny, like on other shows, where they say after the prank, ‘oh it’s just us!’ We just get the jokes out of it, and they we go on to the next one. We don’t ever try to show you how they are feeling. That always seems like a waste of time.”

Translation: Money from Strangers does not have the same emotional depth as Candid Camera. Or the pathos of a Punk’d.

“When Ashton Kutcher would come out, it would seem a little self-congratulatory,” Dye says.

Being on the streets of Manhattan is quite an adventure for the laid-back Seattle boy, who sees every mean street as a happy hamlet for comedy potential.

“I love New York, but I don’t know if I necessarily fit in,” he says. “New York is a little grumpy. I’m a smiley guy. I like to talk to people. I’ll say ‘hi’ to strangers. I’ll always chat up somebody. New Yorkers are confused by my chattiness.”

Not the first time that Dye has been a fish out of water. During his stint on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, he was asked to do the impossible, literally, by suggesting interior designs that would surprise, stimulate and tug at heartstrings.

“As far as building a house or designing a room, or color schemes, I know nothing,” he says. “I’ve never even built a book shelf. So it was weird that they had me on the show. I had a great time, doing my best. The only backfire is that it’s such a nice, sweet, good-hearted show. It was all these kids and moms. Real church kind of people who would start coming to my stand-up comedy show.”

Uh, no, Dye works a bit too blue to have an audience like that. Granted, he’s no Lenny Bruce, but live stand-up is where his heart truly lies. While in New York for the taping of the show, he performs, practically every night, at NYC’s famous Comedy Cellar. He continues to hone his skill and tweet his pretty head off (his followers are growing into the many thousands). Still, under the good looks and the charm and the funny churns the typical insecurities of a typical stand-up comedian.

 

“I’m a late bloomer,” he says. “Girls were not itching to get with me. I didn’t have a lot of friends as a little kid. I grew up real poor. I had a lot of hair. Nobody taught me how to dress. I looked like shit. I had to get a personality first. And I had to learn how to comb my hair.”

How you like him now, America?

 

This article originally ran in The Modern.

 

 

 

 

Categories
The Interviews

Barbara Corcoran: Power Broker to Powerful Motivator

Waitress and straight-D student Barbara Corcoran started her real-estate company,The Corcoran Group, with a friendly loan for a thousand dollars.  In 2001, she sold it for $70 million.

The $5 billion company is still in operation today, and one of the biggest power players in New York real estate.

Since then, Barbara has found many ways to keep herself busy. A wife and mother of two, she’s a real-estate commentator on NBC’s Today Show, and a regular part of the hit ABC seriesShark Tank; she wrote a bestselling business book called If You Don’t Have Big Breasts, Put Ribbons on Your Pigtails as well as Nextville: Amazing Places To Live The Rest of Your Life.

She also travels the country as a speaker, sharing the stories of her unique life and motivating hundreds of thousands of people with her inspiration. Her honesty and smarts have never been more needed and appreciated.

In this exclusive (and very candid) interview with BiggerPockets, Corcoran talks about her wild ride, from her days of search and struggle to one fateful day on the job as a waitress. She also talks about her real estate success – and her regrets.

Can you give us some positive news about the state of real estate these days?

The most positive thing I can say about it is that people underestimate the fact that half the towns across America actually have home prices that are rising. And half have home prices that are selling.

I am a dogged watcher of stats – stats that I believe in most of the time, not all the time. But only about a year ago, or even nine months ago, the great majority of homes were losing value.

So there are the bright spots across America, and it doesn’t have anything to do with the state. There are even bright spots in Florida. I don’t think things are as bad as people really say they are, as far as prices falling.

How is the future looking for us, real estate wise?

I don’t expect a marked difference in the next year. I mean, who the heck knows beyond that, and who even knows next year? That’s because I don’t see any of the large components changing.

One thing that I’m very worried about is the tremendously high foreclosure rate. I know in the last month, foreclosures have actually dropped down, and I was pretty excited to read that. But then I realized that it was nothing more than the result of the banks holding back foreclosures. They say that the foreclosure rate was down because they had ushered forth at the end of the previous month all these foreclosures, all in one week. So that was like a false reading.

This idea that banks are going to modify loans for people who are in need has been a giant hoax. I think it’s almost shameful  that it was filled with such promise, that everybody applied for it and so few people were granted modification. And even if they did, it’s was only for six months or a year. I think that’s a joke. And there are many deserving people who need breaks who aren’t getting them.

I really see the banks as the bad guy. Until they are mandated that they must help, I don’t think they really are going to. I think they are going through the motions, without their heart in it, and it’s not resulting in anything much.

How can a homeowner or investor increase the value of their homes/properties in the current market?

Investors and homeowners are very similar in that they both have the same problem. They have a piece of real estate that isn’t worth as much as they’d like, and that can’t be refinanced as readily as they had hoped. And so what can someone do?  Only a couple of things, and this is assuming that they are not selling, that they just want to increase their value.

They can be very careful about the home improvements they make, whether it be the investor renovating a common lobby, or an individual homeowner who is thinking of doing a gut renovation of the kitchen because they know they can’t sell their home right now and they have to stay put.

I think what’s key here is that you make the surface renovation rather than the deep-pocket renovation, because you are not going to get your money back out of this market to support it. And so you have to think of your home or your investment as a beauty contest that is competing with every other competitor out there. And try to make it look good for less money, and enjoy the process in the meantime.

You openly admit that your life was off to a shaky start (straight D’s in high school and 20 jobs by age 23). How did you turn your life around?

Well, there is no turning point in life. I think what you do is you work yourself through a problem. And I don’t think of all of that as bad news at all. Straight D’s? I mean, honest to God, I deserved straight F’s. They were charity D’s and I was grateful for every one of them.
In terms of the jobs I had before I found my career at 23, hey, that’s not so bad, finding your own career at 23 after trying on 20 things that didn’t quite fit. I was thankful to try those on to know that they weren’t for me. So I don’t think there was any point.

I was waitressing one night and I was lucky enough to have Ramon Simone walk in and order his cup of tea at my counter instead of the other waitress’ counter. That was a lucky break, but he became my boyfriend and investor. He gave me the thousand dollars to start a business.

That was a lucky break, but I was also hustling, working eighteen-hour days as a waitress to get extra money, so I kind of deserved that break. What I think it amounts to always is perseverance, and always being around to catch the lucky breaks.

There is no point that turns you around. I think that there are a million points along the way, of opportunities that are either viewed by you as a bad happening or maybe viewed instead as something that went awry and can be fixed. And I think it’s the dedication to the fixing it that gets you to the next plateau.

You started the Corcoran group with a thousand-dollar loan. What were those first days like?

It was half sheer excitement and half disbelief that someone would actually give me a thousand dollars and become my business partner. I’m still pinching myself about how good that was. Who else was going to give me a thousand dollars? Certainly not Nick the diner manager, who would have liked to keep me as his waitress forever. It was thrilling: the possibilities, and sheer unadulterated fear of not knowing how the heck we were going to build a business. We have the money, but the problem now is, what do you do with it?

So I think I felt a lot better once I realized that the money could keep me in business for six months. I would just buy an ad in The New York Times advertising one property and pay for my princess phone line. And that should last me six weeks. So once I was able to label what the thousand dollars would buy, I knew I had six weeks to run the race, to try to make a deal. I got very lucky. I rented an apartment and made a $340 commission in the first week on my job. So now I had only lost $150 of the thousand, but I had made $340, so I was already ahead of the game.

What attracted you to real estate? Why real estate?

I wasn’t attracted to it. I was attracted to every other job I had: a hotdog salesman, a newspaper dispatcher, a house mother for six orphans in an orphanage, a bookseller in a little local bookstore. I was attracted to anything where they say, ‘you’re hired.’ I wasn’t any more attracted to real estate, except for that my boyfriend said, ‘you’d be great at real estate.’ And I said, ‘why would you think that?’ And he said, ‘because you’re good with people.’ And he gave me the thousand dollars. If he said, ‘you’d be great at plumbing,’ and I asked why, and he said, ‘because I love the way you handle that tea cup,’ I would listen to anything. Anybody who is going to hand you a thousand dollars, you are going to agree with. And that’s how I got started.

What excites you about motivating large groups of people during your speaking engagements?

I’m not trying to motivate people at all. I feel like my job there is to maybe say something that they could use to better whatever they are looking to better: their personal life, their business life, their family life. So when I’m speaking, it’s really just a hodgepodge of stories I tell, of things that made a difference to me along the way.

Certainly, the majority of them are business stories, because that’s where I spent the majority of my time, but many of them are parenting stories. I was very lucky to have a mom who, on the birth of each of her ten children, decided what the child’s gift was and named them, labeled the kid. And labeling has gotten a bad rap, but her labels were all positive. So she chose to see the light in this child, and slammed that label on and son of a gun, we all became what she saw in us.

My whole goal is that I hope to move people to action for themselves, whatever that is, something that they can grab for themselves and make useful. From the responses I always get, I feel like I do that very, very well, so it always feels worthwhile going back and doing more of it.

What seems to be the number-one concern among investors you meet, and how do you advise them?

Well, I’m one of them. I own twelve small apartment buildings in the New York area. I’m doing terribly with them, so I keep my mouth shut, because obviously I don’t know that the heck I am doing! Because two things went awry: the values of those properties have plummeted. And interest rates went down tremendously.

I have many buildings I have financed at twelve or fourteen per cent, and yet interest rates are now 4 ½ %.  I would love to give myself the retroactive advice of not signing up for those mortgages then, when, if I wanted to renegotiate, the interest rate would be considered pre-paying the mortgage. I didn’t realize that. I thought that if mortgage rates come down, I’ll just refinance it. When you pay off the old loan, it’s considered ‘repayment of loan.’ And you get a pre-payment penalty of many, many points.

So here I am, being a savvy real estate investor, with properties being worth a third of what I paid and mortgages that are double and triple what they should be in interest rates. And yet I can’t do a darn thing about it with tenants who are losing jobs and not paying their rent. I would be the last person you should come to for advice.

So you wouldn’t have any advice for a first-time real-estate investor?

That’s different!  Now is the time to strike. There is such a thing in life as timing. You can get cheap money. You can get properties at steep discounts. You can negotiate like crazy and get a great price. Why wouldn’t you buy now? These are the good old days that every investor in the universe has been talking about. Now that they are here, most are too frightened to buy. These are the times to be buying real estate. No doubt about it.

That’s a little different from talking to someone who was buying real estate five, ten or twenty years ago. They have their money tied up and they’re stuck, but if you have cash and you can buy now, you would be crazy not to buy real estate.

How was your experience on Shark Tank? What did you come away with as being a part of that series?

I just came back from LA, shooting the second season of Shark Tank on ABC, which will start airing in March. I don’t think I’ve ever had more fun. I love an audience, but more importantly, I love the idea that I’m in the luckiest seat in the world, getting to see maybe 60 businesses, in a week’s time, pitch me their business. And I get to pick the ones I like the best.

I put my own money into them. That’s a coveted seat that every business investor in America would like to have, and I’ve got it. So I can’t imagine a more fun thing to do. And I get to go home and the show’s not over. It just begins. I actually have to make a deal with these people, sign contracts, do due diligence, and the best part of all, help them get to where they want to go and make their dream come true. I’m really good at that. I’m not so good at money, but I’m really good at business. And I’ve never worked so hard in my life, just to put a reality dose on top of that.

What makes you personally most happy?

Anything I say would sound like a cliché, but I would have to say my kids. I’ve got a five-year-old and sixteen-year-old, and no problems so far, thank God. Also, my husband, who drives me absolutely nuts and I’m surprised I’m not an alcoholic. I’m not sure why you marry your opposite, what goes on there chemically. Those are the things that keep me most interesting.

The most satisfying thing on the work front is accomplishing something, as it is for anybody in any business or job across America. Who wants to have a job where you feel like you don’t accomplish anything worthwhile? I feel like I have a job where what I am working on makes an enormous difference. For that, I am eternally happy and grateful.

For more information on Barbara, go to BarbaraCorcoran.com or follow her on Twitter @BarbaraCorcoran.

 

This article originally ran in BiggerPockets.com.

 

 

Categories
The Interviews

Harley Rides Again

Harley Hall Reinhardt’s ‘80s upbringing brings New York attitude to his photography.

“When I’m seeing moments happen, I’m seeing them happen from a different perspective,” says native New Yorker Harley Hall Reinhardt, our Modern photographer who is also in-demand for weddings, publicity shots, model testing and more (he’s a recipient of The 2013 Brides’ Choice Award).

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The reason for his in-demandness? It could be the pretty blue eyes that were snapped into focus by his awesome ‘80s upbringing, sharing a bohemian Lower East Side pad with dad.

“I helped my father renovate his apartment,” Harley recalls. “We knocked down walls and created this incredible place to live. There was a lot of bonding between my dad and me. I remember him playing a lot of Paul Simon and James Taylor. When I think of my childhood, I think of those moments.”

And Eighties New York was nothing like the gentle, gentrified mini-mall it has become. Growing up on the Lower East Side in the 1980s was somewhat, uh, gritty. A walk on the wild side, as the late Lou Reed had said.

“I would hang out with the Hell’s Angels in Compton Square,” he recalls. “They liked me because my name is Harley.”

These days, nervous brides like him for the assurance he provides in amazing photos of their Manhattan-based destination weddings (see the slide show below).

“You can tell that they are just in awe of this amazing city,” Harley says of his clients, many of whom come from Europe just to exchange vowels in the Big Apfel (that’s German for apple, by the way, and German destination weddings are a huge part of Harley’s clientele). “It’s fun to capture those moments of them being in awe of these crazy buildings and all the taxis and the energy. They are truly experiencing New York, maybe for the first time. You can see it on their faces and in their eyes.”

To keep the photos from taking the downtown train to the intersection of tiresome and clichéd, Harley’s pulls from his own life experience.

“I grew up in an abandoned building,” he says, “and most of the people in there were very eccentric artists and musicians. Very unique people. So when I see New York, I see it from a child’s eye, because I was so fond of my childhood.”

To this exterior end:

“New York is filled with all kinds of incredible landscapes and landmarks,” he says. “There are a lot of interesting moving things, like taxis and colors. It’s very dynamic. All the backgrounds in the city, from the cobblestone streets to the brick walls to the yellow taxis to the store windows, and pools of water on the ground picking up cool reflections. There are shadows from the buildings, and the sunlight coming through creates really amazing effects. The history of New York is so interesting, but mostly it’s just timeless. It inspires me. It’s my city.”

For a time, he also called the entire planet home, as a globe-trotting runway/print model and ski instructor. He was also a deep-sea fisherman for a time, but New York kept reeling him back in.

“I’ve traveled to so many cities and I always come back to New York, because it’s just home,” he says. “It feels good.”

The advent of gay weddings has increased Harley’s demand (sorry, fellas, he’s straight), and he finds himself photographing ceremonies that are not only loving, but historic.

Would he do anything different for a gay couple?

“Absolutely not,” he says. “I’m just as inspired by the love that two guys would have as a straight couple would have. It’s really about love. It’s not about who they are, or aren’t. It’s the look in their eyes. That’s what inspires me. When I see that couple that is truly in love, it’s very inspiring. It doesn’t matter who they are.”

How does a man who spent so much time in front of the camera advise his subjects on how to take a stellar photo?

He says, “Most of the couples I shoot tell me ‘I take terrible pictures.’ Honestly, yeah, that might be so. It’s uncomfortable for most people to be standing in front of a camera. Even for me, I don’t like having my picture taken. So I make my couples interact with each other. I make them sing songs, or laugh out loud. I tell them how beautiful they look. I tell them to look into each other’s eyes, to feel that moment when they first saw each other. If you get them to relax, you can get beautiful photos of anyone, if you understand light and you understand people. It’s not about being good or bad, or innately having some kind of photogenic gift. Sure, there are couples that are a little easier to work with and are a little more free. Usually their pictures do better because they are more animated. But you can get anyone to open up if you go about it correctly.”

Seems like Harley is gunning in that direction.

For more information on Harley, click here.

 

Categories
The Interviews

Greg Kinnear

“I’m not gonna lie to you, it didn’t grab me,” Greg Kinnear says about his first hear-tell of the concept for the Universal film Flash of Genius (originally called Windshield Wiper Man).

However, after doing his due diligence, Kinnear found the David-versus-Goliath story to be both bigger than life and warmly, genuinely human (much like the actor himself, who, in a little more than a decade, has quietly managed to become a joyous and regular part of America’s moviegoing experience).

Kinnear plays one Bob Kearns, a real-life professor who, in the push-button sixties, invented and patented the intermittent windshield wiper (you heard me).

At first, Kearns is wooed by the intrigued Ford Motor Company, and, in his innocent enthusiasm, is over the moon even before the astronauts. Thinking he hit the happy highway, Kearns prepares himself and his brood for life as large as a Ford Galaxie 500.

Unfortunately, those happy endings only happen in the movies.

Instead, Kearns’ dreams are stalled when Ford decides to go it alone with the wiper, leaving him and his empty pockets out in the pouring rain, patent or no patent.

Although he is constantly being talked into a comfortable financial settlement (by Alan Alda as a crusading attorney and Dermot Mulroney as Kearns’ backer/pal with a groovy sixties hairdo), Kearns desires more than mere money: he wants Ford to admit they stole his idea.

So he makes himself a pain in the ass, a ping in Ford’s powerful engine. Acting as his own counsel, an obsessed Kearns fights the corporate giant – and the legal system – over the course of decades.

His family, who could have lived happily ever after from some sweet settlement money, instead suffers from devastating financial and emotional wreckage, as well as big-time bullying from one of the most powerful companies on Earth.

Sound a little off the beaten path for a principled-man-versus-corporate-greed flick? If so, you may first want to conduct an exit interview with the preview audiences, who were cheering at Kearns’ small (and then larger) victories, and also laughing aloud at the inventor’s inventive methods of defending himself in court.

The crowd cheered up a storm – a storm that could require windshield wipers.

“Anyone who understands patent law will understand the magnitude of what we were up against,” Kinnear says. “There is no drier, more uninteresting kind of law, but at the end of the day, this is really a very small story about a guy and his family and the damage that was done to him.”

Like Silkwood and other films before it, the devil can have his damn details. Here, the real story is in the story. You won’t need to take the LSATs or study engineering templates before you buy a ticket. It’s more heart than brain.

“I was thinking about why I liked it so much,” Kinnear says of Kearns’ tale, “and I kind of felt that many of these ‘Little Guy Takes On the Corporation’ films have big, sweeping, cinematic themes. They tend to deal with these big issues about mercury in the water or nuclear power. Big, big themes. And yet [Flash of Genius] was about a guy who invented a wiper mechanism. Not that that’s not a great invention, but because it’s seems so small potatoes, you have to set that aside. The story can’t really be about wipers. You realize that it’s a battle over principle. He gets [Ford] to acknowledge that what they did was wrong, and it felt like that was worth a lot.”

Needless to say, Ford was not exactly willing to ride shotgun on this trip down Memory Lane.

“Any Ford automobiles in this film were not provided by the Ford Motor Company, I assure you,” Kinnear says. “Listen, I think that Ford is treated fairly in this movie. These guys aren’t walking around in black hats and twirling their mustaches. People are marginalized by corporations all the time. That’s not an unusual story. And when that happens, there is a process. The process for justice, as [Alan Alda’s lawyer character] explains to Kearns, is that you don’t get a tickertape parade and keys to the city. You get a check. That’s how justice is dispensed. The issue in the movie is that they just underestimated this man. They picked the wrong guy. They picked the guy who was not looking for a compromise or a settlement or easy money. He was looking for them to acknowledge what they had done was wrong. Corporations – while they are made up of people to some degree – are really made up of policies. Number one on corporate policies’ lists is ‘we didn’t do anything wrong.’ So that butts up against the one tough son of a bitch they came across, and that spelled misfortune for them.”

Like Kearns, Kinnear’s life and acting career was blazed on a completely different trail. His story you have not heard before. He started out simply enough, being born in Indiana, but his father worked as a career diplomat for the U.S. State Department. This caused his Midwestern family to globetrot.

A self-proclaimed newshound, Kinnear was drawn to the excitement of what was happening in the big world as opposed to what was happening on the big screen. Ironically, one of America’s most popular actors had not grown up with the movies in mind.

“I didn’t go to the movies a lot,” he says of his expat youth. “I saw Jaws on my ninth birthday. A pivotal movie experience for me, which I told to Steven Spielberg, by the way. I didn’t see a lot of movies when I was a kid. We were living in Lebanon and Greece. There was a local theatre that played American movies where we lived, that I used to clean. It was a little janitor job that I had there one summer. So I saw some movies there. They were all part of the Armed Forces magazine route. They weren’t the blockbusters. By the time they got to Greece, they were kind of old news. I remember seeing The Exorcist which I probably shouldn’t have, being that I was too young and I snuck into the theater. That was traumatizing. Even now, I don’t see a lot of movies, and I’m regretful that my movie literacy is somewhat stunted. But I’m trying to catch up on it.”

Meanwhile, one could have trouble catching up with Kinnear’s own growing list of film appearances.

In the early nineties, he had quickly hopped from a legendary stint as the pre-snarky host of cable TV’s Talk Soup to the plum role of Harrison Ford’s little brother in Sabrina. He received an Oscar nomination for his work in As Good As It Gets, and drew raves for You’ve Got Mail, The Matador, Little Miss Sunshine, Nurse Betty and the Bob Crane biopic, Auto Focus. And let’s not forget that he sang and danced with Meryl Streep, not in Mamma Mia, but in Stuck On You.

His career seems to be anything but, uh, intermittent. Today he appears in the Ricky Gervais comedy Ghost Town at the very same multiplex as Flash of Genius.

However, he is humble about his track record.

“Of course, it’s misleading,” he says of the common misconception that he never stops getting jobs in Hollywood. “Probably the cable and the satellite of it all, combined with movies that do come out [makes it look like] there is this non-stop thing happening. I can just tell you without any question that I have big, huge holes. I have a five-year-old and a two-year-old daughter and I’ve gotten to spend an extensive amount of time with them. This year was kind of a crazy year. I did Baby Mama and Ghost Town and [Flash of Genius] and then this Paul Greengrass movie [Green Zone, coming in 2009] and that was a strange cluster of films. Prior to that, I hadn’t worked in like a year. It comes and goes. It ebbs and flows a little bit. A lot of the stuff that I do is supporting. If you look at my career, a lot of it is smaller, supporting stuff. When I did The Gift, I wasn’t spending the same amount of time that Cate Blanchett was. So that’s partly an illusion. But yes, I’ve had some consistency and for that I’m grateful. It’s not like I’m looking for huge windows to not work. I feel like I’m lucky for what has come.”

For many aspiring actors who yearn to be on the big screen, Kinnear’s star-crossed career may seem like the stuff of fairy tales, but he insists it’s more about being grounded.

“I keep waiting to have that epiphany where I wake up one morning and I say that I finally have a handle on this,” he says of his profession. “That I got this whole thing in the bag. That I have it figured out. That just hasn’t happened. I suspect it never does. If it appears to be a fairy tale, then that’s a fairy tale, because I’ve had to work pretty hard and it hasn’t come easy. The truth is that I’ve had plenty of ups and downs. But now I have a better understanding of the technique of acting, the craft of it. It’s always an ongoing process. I didn’t use to feel like an actor. I do now. And I’m very proud to be an actor.”

Meanwhile, he continues to light up the contemporary movie screen, one memorable role at a time, as steady and dependable as Bob Kearn’s windshield wipers.

 

This article originally appeared in Popentertainment.com.

 

Categories
The Interviews

Dermot Mulroney

This Hollywood survivor tells us how he survived Southeast Asia while making his flick, Trade of Innocents.

Take a look at Dermot Mulroney’s IMDb. Holy crap, it goes on for miles. It may not have occurred to you until this very moment, but this cat has worked steadily in the movies since Reagan was President. Go ahead, name somebody famous – yep, he’s worked with them: Julia Roberts. Paul Newman. Leonardo DiCaprio. Jane Fonda. Steve Buschemi. Even Emilio Estevez.

For three decades, he has brought his own gravelly gravity to film, often cast as the Crackerjack prize in a romcom, or a determined suburban dad (in Gracie), or a no-count like Dirty Steve in Young Guns, but he is never the same character twice. Ever.

Granted, he’s had every opportunity to phone it in and coast on his steady in-demandness, but he doesn’t play that game.
“I try to be real good every time I take on a role,” he tells me. “That’s what’s half the fun.”

Dermot Mulroney Trade of Innocents

Even when that fun is no fun at all, like the subject matter of one of his recent projects, Trade of Innocents. In it, he plays a human trafficking investigator in Southeast Asia. Heavy drama for sure, but another battle won for the brave actor, who again courageously stumbles into unknown territory.

“I have to admit that at first I didn’t know anything about child sex slavery,” he says. “So I looked into it right away and recognized what kind of massive problem it is. It blew me away. When I saw the script, I knew I had to do it.”

Directed by Christopher Bessette (of The Enemy God and the documentary Niagara: Thunder of the Waters), the film deals with the engine of guilt, and how it drives the characters in ways that will not let them return to Start.

It co-stars Oscar-winner Mira Sorvino, playing Mulroney’s wife, whose character is grieving for the loss of her own young daughter under a similar devastating consequence.

Dermot Mulroney Trade of Innocents

“She’s one of our finest actors,” he says of Sorvino. “And on top of that, she’s been around the world with the UN and other organizations.”

True that: she was named as Goodwill Ambassador to combat human trafficking for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Coincidence? We think not.

The haunting film won “Best of the Fest” at the Breckenridge Festival of Film and Best Picture winner at the International Christian Visual Media Festival. The Huffington Post called it “unflinching” but “with a glimmer of hope.”

“There are so few films that have touched on this,” Mulroney says. “It almost has pop appeal, but it couldn’t be darker material. It’s a strange and effective combination.”

The steamy jungle of Thailand was only the next career layover in a series of globetrots. Previously, he was in icy Canada filming the The Grey.

“I finished shooting The Grey in February 2012 and went right away to Thailand finishing this movie. Back-to-back days in between shooting those two movies. We were based in Vancouver, British Columbia but the scenes of the storm and the plane wreck were in Smithers, British Columbia. That’s 595 miles north of Vancouver. I went from one extreme to another: 35 degrees below zero in British Columbia and then to Thailand where we are easily shooting in 100 degrees, 105. It’s half the fun to have wild experiences like that.”

He’s also a man on the road earning a living for his new family (he has two young daughters), with long jags away from home.

“Thank goodness for Skype,” he says.

Dermot Mulroney Trade of Innocents

Mulroney came of age in Alexandria, Virginia, and attended Northwestern University, graduating in 1985. He started working as an actor in Hollywood almost immediately after that, first in melodramatic TV movies (The Drug Knot, Sins of Innocence). It wasn’t long before Young Guns (1988) and Longtime Companion (1989) placed him higher on the go-to list, and he was immersed in a lifetime of steady work. It’s an actor’s dream, but not a dream that he conjured from the beginning.

“I was so dedicated to the idea that having a shot as an actor in Hollywood was impossible,” he says. “My Plan A was to learn film and to hopefully become a cameraman or cinematographer. I was taking acting classes, but I was also studying film, so I was learning how to pull cable and load film and be involved in making movies. And it happened anyway.”

His turn as Michael in the 1997 smash hit My Best Friend’s Wedding established him as the romantic leading man: handsome, yes, but also grounded and smart. The funny, ironic script won millions of repeat fans and accomplished two tasks: it knocked the romantic comedy on its ass while showing that Mulroney could be that guy’s guy who women love. It was the anti-rom-com.

“That’s what was genius about that movie,” he says. “That’s why it’s had the life it’s had. It was exactly the opposite of what you thought it was going to be. That’s so hard to do in the movies. Sometimes the simplest idea is the best.

“She doesn’t get the guy. It’s that classic, classic portrait of the sad clown, and yet you’re looking at Julia Roberts! I watched it again about two years ago, and I couldn’t believe how dark and edgy it was. It has qualities that you’ve never seen in any other movie. It was really smart.”

A long-time companion of independent, small films, Mulroney has also lent his talents to such gems as the now-classic surreal comedy Living in Oblivion (“It sticks around. It sticks in your head.”) and the acclaimed 2001 sleeper hit Lovely & Amazing. In addition, he’s made memorable TV appearances on Friends (as Rachel’s nemesis) and recently on New Girl (as an older love interest).

“It’s always changing,” he says of his career. “I’m definitely in a great place now. I was also in a great place when I started. But I had ebbs and flows. I’ve had creativity block and opportunity. These things are never the same.”

Good to hear, Derm! Your acting roles may always vary, but don’t you ever change.

Photos courtesy of Monterey Media Inc.

Categories
The Interviews

Randy Couture

The mixed-martial-arts legend, actor and entrepreneur is anything but expendable.

“I don’t have any real fears or phobias,” admits Randy Couture, the combat-sports veteran and mixed-martial-arts champion who became the first man in UFC history to win the heavyweight title three times, and retired from fighting at the spry age of 47. “I have a healthy respect for heights, but I’m not afraid of them. I jumped out of a lot of helicopters in the Army. I think it’s different to have a respect for something versus a fear of it.”

Distinction made. Respect is something that this Oregon native has earned big time, as to date he is the only UFC competitor to hold titles in both the heavyweight and light-heavyweight divisions. He has over 25 years of training in freestyle and Greco-Roman wrestling, and his offense technique in mixed-martial-arts competition is forever known as “ground and pound.”

“You are either coming off a commiseration or a celebration,” he says of his morning-after psychology during his years of going at it with very few rules. “And it certainly depends on the fight. If you made a mistake, you try to figure out what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again. There were some fights where I didn’t walk right for six weeks afterward. There is definitely a psychological letdown after the fight is over. I wouldn’t call it a depression, but you feel rundown and exhausted. Sometimes it can last for longer than a week after a fight. Some guys don’t ever recover. They’re not the same fighters. They’re not the same athletes. I usually would take a week off, withdrawal and reset, kind of recover, and then get back into the gym and start training again.”

Now, he’s no longer fighting but he’s hardly retired. Talk about fear vs. respect: he’s in the process of building an empire, swimming with the sharks in the world of big business (with his Las-Vegas-based gym and Extreme Couture merchandise). As well, he is keeping good pace in the biggest shark tank of all: Hollywood, as an actor.

“I’ve been in sixteen pictures now,” he says of his other career. “I don’t know if that’s a lot by the industry’s standard. But I’m certainly learning more, developing more tools, trying to create real emotion and finding the character so I can somehow tell the truth. I’m intrigued by the whole acting process. I don’t know if you’re naturally born with it or not, but it is something that I’m learning to do and I’m having fun doing it.”

An audition – and the acting competition – can prove to be just as big a blow as a sucker punch or a jab to the head. It can ravage the ego more than the ribcage, but Couture keeps his eyes fixed on the future and his shoulders at the ready.

“I became more and more comfortable with the realization that I wouldn’t be competing anymore,” he says of his UFC retirement. “Honestly, I think acting is taking up a big part of my life now. I’m competing with a lot of other guys for these roles, so I’ve got to put myself out there in a similar way. Mentally and physically, there is some crossover that I find from fighting to acting. I’ve shifted my focus to that and I feel like it’s going well.”

What makes Couture’s engine run? His adrenaline rush still belongs to mom.

“I think it’s something I’ve learned from my mother,” he says of his tireless drive. “My mom was a single parent and had a particular work ethic. The kids had to pull our own weight. We had to do a lot of things around the household that other kids didn’t have to do. My mom was working two jobs, so we didn’t go without too much. So I took that example and the necessity of having to do a lot of things for myself and for my sisters. I realized very early on that I was going to get out of it whatever I put into it. It’s brought me a long way down the road.”

One of the stops along that road includes a juicy part in the Sly Stallone action blockbuster The Expendables (both the original and the sequel). Although a surprise summer hit to say the least, Couture had no doubt that the film would be the object of an international bromance.

“I don’t know how it couldn’t be a hit with that cast of guys,” he says, which includes Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis and Chuck Norris. “I don’t know how anybody who grew up in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties couldn’t go and watch that film.”

With his eyes fixed on the future, he still maintains a connection to his first love.

“I still have a very strong passion for fighting,” he says. “I’m now watching my son compete and climb up the ladder. It’s very exciting for me to see him develop and see him finding success. He has a strong passion for the sport. In some ways, I am vicariously living through him. I don’t worry at all. I see his preparation. I see the sacrifices he makes. I see the passion. He’s doing what he wants to do.”

Like father, like son. It’s a few go-rounds in a UFC ring that puts the rest of his life – and his other passions – into perspective.

He says, “After walking out into a [UFC] crowd like that and exposing yourself in that way and feeling that kind of adrenaline, everything else is a walk in the park.”

 

This article originally ran in The Modern.

 

 

 

 

Categories
Good Books The Interviews

Bald Bryan’s Shrinkage

The Adam Carolla Show’s Bryan Bishop writes a bestselling memoir about his battle with a brain tumor – where shrinkage is actually a good thing.

Bryan Bishop, the cast member known to millions of Adam Carolla podcast fans as “Bald Bryan,” has written a memoir about life with an inoperable brain tumor. The book, called Shrinkage: Manhood, Marriage and the Tumor That Tried To Kill Me, refers to the procedure that would reduce the tumor’s threat while Bryan upped the stakes on his life, both personal and professional.

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His relationship with Adam goes back a ways — Bryan was a call screener for the classic Loveline radio show, hosted by Adam and Dr. Drew Pinsky, pre-digital age. He currently keeps the conversation going with Adam on the groundbreaking, record-breaking podcast (along with Alison Rosen, pictured below with Bishop and Carolla). He’s got a quick wit, a thing for movies (he’s often featured in a film review segment on the podcast called “Hooray For Baldywood”), and a love for sports, especially fantasy football. You also may have seen him on TV, when he won $100,000 on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.

In 2009, during one of Adam’s podcasts, Bryan announced the tumor’s arrival. At the time, doctors gave him six months to a year to live, and the naysayers didn’t see much of a future in podcasting. Yet here we are, far into the future, with Bryan thankfully still with us and Adam’s podcast going stronger than ever.

Here, Bryan gives us the details on how a memoir about a tumor can become a New York Times bestseller.

 

New York Times bestseller! Congrats! That’s not easy. Were you surprised that the book was received as well as it was? 

I guess it was a surprise because I’m a first-time author and I have a small amount of notoriety – admittedly small. So of course I was incredibly humbled by the way the book was received.

At the same time, our fans are loyal and extremely enthusiastic. If they find something they believe in, then they are going to support it. They are pretty much 100% genuine. I put as much of myself as I could into this book, and people responded to it.

Yet the book was embraced by people who may not even know what a podcast is. 

Initally the book is supported by fans of the show, or perhaps people who are looking for a cancer recovery memoir. Yet if the book is going to have any long-lasting life or success, it is going to be because people read it and responded to it or have people they know who would get something out of it.

What was it like to write about the process of battling a tumor?

It was very carthartic. At times, it was just emotional, just putting it into words or thinking about it. Yet it helped me put a lot of things into perspective and put a lot of things behind me that need to get put behind me.

I traveled up north to the San Francisco Bay area where my parents live and I interviewed them. That was an emotional time too for all of us, but I’m glad that we did it and I’m glad that we talked about things. It was helpful.

It’s hard to write about yourself or something that happened to you. Talking to friends, co-workers and family about how they were feeling, I certainly learned a lot about that. A lot of it I never knew and I wasn’t privy to. There were a lot of things that people did not want to tell me and didn’t want to burden me with.

Also, in talking to my doctors, I learned a lot about how close it came to being a really bad situation – it was a really bad situation, how close I came to losing the battle. I don’t think I really was aware of that at the time.

How is your health now?

Right now, I’m living with my shrunken tumor. It has shrunk quite a bit from the initial round of treatment. As long as it continues to not grow, I’ll live with it for the rest of my life and it will be something that is there but won’t affect me that much.

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It’s like a diet, trying to lose those last five pounds. I’m trying to get the last 5% of my ability back from before my diagnosis. I do Pilates and go to the gym and I try to stress that. It’s a little-by-little recovery which I’ll always be working on.

All told, you seem to be a pretty optimistic guy. Yeah?

I tend to look at life in a glass-half-full kind of way. I can’t say that I was entirely responsible for my recovery but I think it had a lot to do with the way I recovered like I did.

Your wife, Christie, had much to do with your recovery as well. In what ways?  

I would not be here today if it weren’t for Christie. She was my 24-hour-a-day caregiver during the worst of my treatment. I was doing so poorly that I couldn’t get to the bathroom by myself. She helped me do everything. She helped me get dressed. She helped me dry off after a shower.

She was a 29-year-old woman at the time, responsible for her own life, and she had a fiancé who needed her for everything. She did an incredible job of taking care of me and helping nurse me back to health. And that was just the physical stuff. She was so incredibly emotionally supportive. She’s a strong, strong woman and an amazing person. Anyone who reads the book will tell you that she’s the star of the story.

How about Adam Carolla? How did Adam take the news of your illness? 

To his credit, he was always the same Adam that I always knew. Some people act differently around people who are sick, or cancer patients. Adam was the same old guy, and he wants to make sure that I’m doing well and that I’m taken care of. He’s a great guy and a good boss and a good friend.

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You’re active with The National Brain Tumor Society. How rewarding is that experience?

They have a walk to raise money for brain tumor awareness and research. They asked me if I wanted to be their L.A. chairman for the walk, and I was honored. So many people have been so incredibly good to me while I was going through the worst of it; so much good energy and goodwill. I had an opportunity to pay that back. I jumped at the chance, and I’m now in my third year. I could not be more priviledged and more honored to be a part of it.

What is it about fantasy football that you love? 

I love the social aspect of fantasy football, playing with your friends. And the competiton is fun. I love doing it because it involves a low level of gambling. You put your skills and your smarts to the test. And it’s football – what’s there not to love?

Movies are a big part of your many passions too. 

We’re in the golden age of documentaries so there is always something interesting to watch and always something new coming up. It’s good to share the word and tell people about it.

The prices are a little bit out of hand [today], but from my perspective, I love going to movies. I love the theaters. I love the experience. From my point of view, it’s just getting better and better. Every theater I go to has stadium seating and the sound is better and the picture is better. It’s just an overall better experience.

Adam is currently successfully battling “patent trolls,” who are suing podcasters like Adam and accusing podcasters of stealing technology. How bogus. What’s your take on the case? 

I really do think everything is going to work out. I don’t think they have much of a case.  This is a pretty ridiculous open-and-shut situation. I don’t think they have much of a leg to stand on.

 

Read our interview with The Adam Carolla Show‘s other co-host, Alison Rosen, here!

 

Listen to The Adam Carolla Show here. It’s free!

 

Donate to the National Brain Tumor Society here

 

 

Categories
The Interviews

Bebe Neuwirth

Oh, snap! Morticia Addams was only one of many morphs in a continually evolving career.

Bebe Neuwirth tells me this story, and it’s so Bebe Neuwirth (we’ll discuss in a moment):

The “Lilith” part I auditioned for [on Cheers] was one scene. The character was described as a “clinical, very uptight person.” It was regarding a date [with Frasier Crane] that had gone very badly. It even said in the character description, “hair straight back in a bun.” Kelsey Grammer has a line: “I can count the comb marks in your hair.” She was all buttoned up, so I dressed like that for the audition. I just put my hair in a ballet bun. I’ve been wearing my hair like that for ballet class all my life. I buttoned up my shirt and wore a pencil skirt. I went in and got the part and did the read through. We broke for lunch. I went home, took my hair out of the bun, put on my black leather miniskirt and my high heels and my satin shirt  — remember, this was the Eighties — and I went back to work. I looked completely different. I looked like myself. I was 26 years old. I was a little fox. Ted [Danson] introduced himself to me again. I said, “No, I already met you. I played Lilith.”

Right? The stunningly beautiful, multitalented actress with the distinctive voice, the two Tonys, the two Emmys, and the endless supply of grace and depth continues to make us mistakenly introduce ourselves to her again. After a solid and varied career in TV, film and stage [including a recent Broadway turn as Morticia Addams in The Addams Family], the Princeton, NJ native knocks us for another loop. This time, it’s with an eclectic new CD called Porcelain [Leopard Works Records].

“It’s a very interesting process to put together an album,” she says, “with the feeling that the person is going to listen to these songs in a certain order.  You go, ‘Wow, I had no idea that Tom Waits and Edith Piaf would go together so well, but listen to that!’  It’s a very interesting creative process.”

The CD does its digital best to contain her amazing vocal talent.

“I guess I have an unusual voice,” she says. “People recognize me by my voice all the time. In my generation, as a dancer in musical theater, you had to be able to sing also. So I took singing lessons when I was a kid. I really did most of my training on the job. I was able to carry a tune. It’s not a small voice or a giant voice.”

That voice also naturally lends itself to Shakespeare, which Neuwirth recently performed as Titania (perfect, right?) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for The Classic Stage Company.

“It reminds me of dancing in a ballet,” she says of Shakespearian drama. “If you do a classical ballet, there is gorgeous music swelling behind you. In Shakespeare, no matter how you decide to do the play, or what the production is, and it doesn’t matter who the players are, that beautiful music is always there. That music in Shakespeare is the text. It’s thrilling — emotionally, psychically, spiritually — to live and breathe in those characters and say those words.”

She is still best remembered for the character of Lilith Crane, who was long-running on Cheers and often-recurring on Frasier.

“I always thought she was kind of heartbreaking,” Neuwirth says. “She was socially inept. She didn’t know how to be with people. She did have this fiery, very passionate soul inside. She was just awkward socially.”

A far cry from Neuwirth herself, yet most people would be surprised to learn that she does not share her beloved TV character’s academic credentials.

“I was a terrible student,” she says. “I really wasn’t interested in anything at the time. I was just finishing high school so that I could go to New York City and dance. People think I’m really smart. I didn’t go to college. I’m not stupid. I’m a fairly bright person. But I just play smart people.”

This article originally appeared in Popentertainment.com.

Categories
The Interviews

Mohr! Mohr! Mohr! How Do You Like It? How Do You Like It?

The beloved funnyman now rocks a powerful podcast.

By Ronald Sklar

Photography by Harley Hall.

One person not caught up in the Charlie Sheen hoopla is comedian/actor Jay Mohr. In fact, Sheen, sober, sane and coherent, chilled uncharacteristically with the put-it-there-pal Mohr, who has a gift of bringing out the best in people. The two shared the shit on the highly downloaded podcast Mohr Stories, which Jay Mohr hosts.

Mohr tells me, “I think Charlie opened up with me because for the first time in a decade, somebody was really asking him detailed questions about things that he had acted in. I needed to know about Platoon. I needed to know about Wall Street. I needed to know about his relationship with Jim Abrams on Hot Shots. We both wanted to talk about Apocalypse Now, and then the conversation took a turn toward great Oscar snubs [of which Sheen’s father, Martin, was one for Apocalypse Now].”

Amazingly, the conversation continued to take breathtaking screeches on tight corners, drawing us in deeper and deeper, as good podcasts are able to do. Podcasts are new, but they mark the return of the art of conversation, and Mohr knows how to hold one with the best of them. Sheen indulged in his passion for baseball trivia, at one point even showing Mohr his prized Babe Ruth autographed baseball. Sheen hadn’t seemed this animated in a long time, in a way that wouldn’t make headlines.

Mohr says, “I think sports and film are interrelated in the passion they inspire in others and when you get a good conversation going. So you go down this rabbit hole with sports and movies.”

The rabbit hole in which Mohr travels sports quite a ride. The New Jersey native began his long stand-up life while still baby-faced and in high school, back in the late Eighties. During those hungry years, he formed The Persona.

“The crutch was that I was so young and that I really looked young,” he says, “which bred a complete inferiority complex, I’m sure, which is why I probably have always been so aggressive.”

He ducked and rolled into the cutthroat world of standup just in time for the great migration to Hollywood, when every comedian was being considered as the next Seinfeld.

“I got in right under the curtain closing of the late Eighties comedy boom,” he says. “I was just tall enough to ride that ride. I rode to Buffalo for $50, and I knew it was costing me $150, but I had to go show people in Buffalo because maybe they will invite me back to headline another time.”

His shuffle off to Buffalo would have to wait. Before not very long at all, he was featured on Saturday Night Live (1993-1995) and he played the sitcom brother on season one of The Jeff Foxworthy Show. Then, if you can believe it hadn’t happened yet, came The Big Break.

Mohr explains, “Cameron Crowe called me on the set of The Jeff Foxworthy Show and said, ‘What are you doing for the next three months?’ I thought, ‘I’m going to be the biggest star in the world. This is it. I am on my way.’”

The classic role of sleazy agent Bob Sugar in Jerry Maguire drop-kicked Mohr higher into the beautiful sky. The film, released at the end of 1996, opened at #1 and eventually grossed over $273 million worldwide. Immediately following came the romantic comedy Picture Perfect, where Mohr played against 1997’s most recognizable woman, Jennifer Anniston.

Forget Anniston — what was it like to see yourself up there on the big screen?

“It’s almost seems entirely too short,” he says. “It always seems entirely too brief. I’m a showoff. I’m a comic. I like the parts with me in it the most.”

You’ve got to give him that, since he earned every second of screen time he’s clocked.

“I come from a family that worked their balls off,” he says. “I grew up in very middle-class, Italian-Catholic/Irish-Catholic New Jersey. Every pair of socks in that sock drawer you earned. Nothing you have was ever handed to you. You worked for ten years to put a six-foot deck in the back of your house. That was your reward.”

As the millennium turned, Fox offered him the groundbreaking series Action, in which he played an uber-aggressive Hollywood producer Peter Dragon. The series had “classic” written all over it, but many critics decreed “too inside!”

“It was ahead of its time,” Mohr says. “It may have behooved Fox to try it on another night instead of simply canceling it.”

Eventually, as the digital age took hold of audiences and sent them scattering and fractioning, Mohr went for what he does best.

“I have only one discernable skill,” he says, “and it’s talking. One thing I’ve always wished I could change about myself is my inability to just stop talking. They told me that since I was in first grade. I always got thrown out of class because I wouldn’t stop talking.”

If only those teachers could see him now, hosting one of the most downloaded podcasts on the planet. His Mohr Stories features his brand of banter-with-the-buddies, along with a heapin’ helpin’ of his brilliant mimicry (his impressions of Colin Quinn, Norm MacDonald, Woody Allen and Christopher Walken, among others, must not be missed). He also banters with the likes of Jay Leno, The Black Crowes, fellow podcast king Adam Carolla, and even former death-row inmate Damien Echols.

“I do pride myself on the positivity of the podcast,” he says. “I’m not really ball washing as much as you may think.”

The conversations are at the very least compelling, especially the can’t miss one-on-one with former boxer Ray Mancini, who discusses the accidental death of his challenger, South Korean boxer Duk Koo Kim, in 1982. The incident, which was one big sucker punch in the history of sports, spiraled Mancini into a deep depression, which he has battled ever since.

Mohr says, “What’s amazing to me about the Ray Mancini interview is when he cries. He cries at the memory of his mother icing his hand. It blew me away. People don’t realize that Ray Mancini retired at 24. That’s when guys start in boxing. They nurse you along until you go pro. He had a lot left. He left a lot on the table. But when your hands end someone’s life, it sort of takes that out of you. I’m talking to a man who has killed someone, and now this word has more import than it has ever had.”

For Mohr, the alpha and the omega is the late George Carlin (“He was pretty obsessive compulsive about his act being perfectly timed.”), and another comedy hero of his is unlikely: his beautiful wife, Nikki Cox, late of the series Las Vegas.

“She’s funnier than any writer that I had write things for me,” he says. “She’s much more dada than I am. My standup is at least half her writing. She’ll actually hand me pieces of paper on an airplane while I’m sleeping. She’ll write things that I never would have thought of.”

Long trip, and in many ways, just beginning. New man, making fresh with the old tricks. But a Mohr Stories podcasts promises big humor with a dash of reflection. You’re listening to a man who has been around the block and lived to tell the tale. And, he admits, he still learning when to keep his think-quick mouth shut

He says, “It takes a long time to stand there and simply be comfortable in the quiet.”

 

 

 

Listen to Mohr Stories for free!

 

 

Categories
The Interviews

Henry Rollins

“I could grandstand and tell you I’m The Man, but I basically don’t have a life,” Henry Rollins tells me in a recent phone interview.

As usual, The Man is being too hard on himself. The rock legend, now in his early forties and still as tough as a fifty-cent steak, has it for sure going on. He recently completed an 88-show spoken word tour, two USO tours — one to Iraq and Kuwait, the other to Honduras — and flexed his considerable acting chops in a major motion picture. This is in addition to hosting a seriously-listened-to radio show that airs in Los Angeles, his intense schedule of record producing, the day-to-day running of his publishing company, and his Marine-like daily workout, which includes pushups using only his knuckles.

If I called him a Renaissance Man, would he kick my ass from here to Sunday? And would he have time to do it?

“I’ve been called a lot of things,” he admits, “as long as they don’t call me late for dinner.”

So what makes Henry run? Why – after a satisfying career as a music pioneer, actor, monologist, writer/publisher and business entrepreneur – would he not opt for a nice, cozy nap? Or at least a week on a chaise lounge at Sandals?

“I have a low threshold for boredom,” he says. “I’d rather do stuff than talk about doing stuff. The idea is to work vigorously. All my heroes work vigorously: Miles Davis, Duke Ellington. I’d rather do that than take three months off to find myself on some beach.”

Of course, there are things he won’t do. He recently turned down a six-figure offer from a Japanese liquor company  — a la Bill Murray in Lost In Translation – to sit still for a whiskey advertisement (“I don’t hang out with alcohol,” he says). He also won’t do drugs or smoke cigarettes. That’s right. The front man for Black Flag, one of the most influential groups of the punk movement, is a teetotaler (I only hope he won’t kick my ass if I call him that.).

“I have never been tempted,” he says. “I have been drunk about three times. In ‘87 I tried marijuana for the one and only time. Tried LSD. Interesting. Can lose your mind. Something told me, ‘you’re not doing this anymore’ and I said, ‘right’ and I didn’t.”

He gets his high from working. He’s been doing it since he was ten, in the suburbs of DC. Dad was an academic (“he was tough as nails”), and his parents divorced when he was still in diapers. Henry came up rough and ready, the product of boys’ prep schools. Hard to believe now, but he originally looked like the “before” picture in the Charles Atlas ads. However, a history teacher (who was also a former Vietnam vet with six kills to his record) talked him into weightlifting, which he took to like a social outcast to a Black Flag concert. He bought his first workout equipment from Sears, which he could barely lift into his mom’s VW. Six weeks later, he could throw the equipment across the parking lot.

“Weightlifting was good for me in high school because I didn’t have to compete and you didn’t get laughed at,” he says. “I grew up skinny and raised on Ritalin. [The history teacher] was a male role model who was actually giving me a moment of his time.  He wouldn’t allow me to look into the mirror [while I was training], and I didn’t. [Once I finally did,] it was a huge revelation that I made this [new body] happen. The confidence that came with that…all of the sudden you are being left alone at gym. I went to an all-boys pseudo-military school. I beat up and hospitalized a senior when I was in tenth grade, which is basically all the work you need to do for the rest of your life in high school. The seniors respected the fact that I righteously bloodied one of theirs. Your peer group is like, ‘yeah! One of our guys beat up an upper-classman.’ My last two and half years in high school were then pretty cool. It was like, leave the Ritalin boy alone.”

Rollins tried college for about a minute (“My fellow students were so boring,” he recalls. “It was really depressing. None of my classmates read. Everyone was concerned instead with beer and bongs. And I thought, fuck this, I’m not doing four years of this.”).  Instead he experienced life on the minimum wage: “shoveling, parking, scooping, tearing, carrying.” He was even a taxi driver for liver samples for the National Institute of Health. All the while, he poured some sugar into the bank. He also met a savvy and trustworthy financial manager along the way, who helped him deal with the dollars, which eventually came in.

“I’ve been saving since I was ten,’ he says. “I don’t have extravagances.”

Of course, extravagances is a relative term. Rollins is not exactly Amish. This simple man does own three houses, but in all fairness, two of those houses are filled with his vast music collection. However, he didn’t earn his real estate by being a rebel without a clause. He’s a damn astute businessman. Of his place in the music biz, he says, “I [don’t want to sound like] the Space Cowboy, where I’m talking about birds and bees and flowers and trees while I let the money people talk about money.Kiss my ass! That’s how you lose everything and you have no options. There is a mistake with people in my business where they think it’s going to keep coming in. Like all the rappers, who had the mansions and now they’re back at mom’s. I bought property. I own three houses. I want to have dough when I’m 55, so rock that.”

Luckily for Rollins, he was able to build his empire while still staying true to his art, and to himself.

Of that fine line, he says, “Ice-T taught me this years ago. You are a whore – you might as well learn how to be a pimp too and pimp yourself. The big mistake artists make is that they think people at the record company are their friends. If I drop below a certain percentage of sales, I don’t get past Reception. And so, I keep the integrity on, but I’m always looking to learn something and put some money in the bank because in my work, 100% of my income is approval based. When [the public stops saying], ‘Yay!’ I’m out of a job. Nobody but Ozzy and Sinatra and Mick Jagger get to go lifelong in this. Certainly not a mere mortal like myself.”

Mortal maybe; mere, never. His drive is always shifted into first, his pedal to the metal.

“I’ve always had that vigorous sink or swim thing,” he says. “And I have it now. I always feel like I’m the guy in the mailroom. I always feel like I’m the opening band that goes on at 7:30 that no one’s going to see. I’ve never thought anything else.”

His early years with Black Flag mirrored this image of the muscular underdog, and also of the disciplined anarchist. This lifestyle, which seemed rambling but was actually very stratified and directed, stayed with him way past the expiration date. Of these hard-core pioneer years, he says, “We were a very ambitious band. We were doing seven shows a week, sometimes two sets a night. We were doing a record every seven or eight months, writing twenty songs at a time.”

Compared to this, his following project, the Rollins Band, was a picnic or no picnic, depending on whether you are Type A or Type B.

“With the Rollins Band, it was boot camp,” he says. “At band practice you turned the air conditioner off and closed the doors. Roasting hell. We practiced like Marines. The first show will be on point. We will fuck you up. No meandering. It was like, I’m on a mission. Here it is, motherfucker. It’s a lot of discipline. I’ve averaged 106 shows a year for 24 years.”

This is in addition to his quiet time, which is the closest Rollins will ever get to a Calgon bath. His writing, most of it all published and well-read by scores of fans who may have never even heard a word of his music, is another way to keep the demons to drop down and give him forty.

“I hate writing,” he says. “I just wish I could stop but I can’t. Writing is not a joy to me. The better you get at it, the harder it is, because it’s less time that you bullshit yourself. I’ve met a handful of writers and they’re pretty miserable people. Because they know that the beast is sitting in the room saying, ‘come on. You know you’ve been playing around with your friends long enough. Back to class.’”

And, of course, you don’t need to read Henry Rollins in order to read him. You can always find deep meaning in the tattoos, right on his person.

“I got started in ’81,” he says, “in those grimy places in Hollywood. Nowadays, you have to stand in line behind a model and a housewife, but not then. Society catches up with all of this. I wanted to be different. I wanted to customize the chassis. I used to think that by decorating the exterior you change the interior. I don’t get tattooed anymore, but I don’t regret anything that is on me. My first tattoo was a Black Flag logo on my left arm. Actually, that was the only one I ever really needed. You get one, and in your youthful bravado, you’re riding this rock thing until the wheels come off so you may as well get another tattoo.”

Adding to the list of surprises is Rollins’ musical tastes. It’s everything you would expect, and less. Picture the man, just him and his tattoos, sitting naked in a hotel room, on the phone with his credit card on his thigh, ordering the Time-Life collection of AM Gold from an infomercial. The story you’ve just read is true. Rollins can dig Van McCoy, Chicago, Kansas, Minnie Ripperton and “Rock The Boat” as much as the stuff you just know he likes and why bother asking.

He says, “As I get older, I find that the music I listened to on Casey Kasem on Sunday afternoons has a certain appeal now.”

You can add to this list everybody’s favorite guilty pleasure, William Shatner. Like Rollins, Shatner is both a show biz curio and an extremely gifted performer. The partnership seems as natural as it is unnatural. Co-piloting on the song “I Can’t Get Behind That” on Shatner’s latest album, Has Been, Rollins got to work with one of his idols, Adrian Belew from King Crimson. Belew, who lived down the street from the studio, was requested by Shatner in the middle of a recording session when he said, “Henry, we need a guitar.” This story, in itself, is not interesting, but the way Rollins does a Shatner impression is priceline – er, priceless. You simply had to be there.

Did Belew know who Rollins was? That’s a big 10-4. Could he rattle off even two of Rollins’ own songs? Most likely, negatory.

Of his degree of fame, which can range from feverish to frosty, depending on if you’ve reached the party to whom you are speaking, Rollins says, “I’m not a multi-platinum artist, so they’re not camping out on my lawn. I don’t need security to go to the grocery store. People recognize me all the time at the grocery store or at the hardware store. Do I get talked to a lot? Yes. Do I get recognized? Within one traffic light. The car next to me. Within a minute of walking to any hotel, airport, restaurant, store…within a minute. I see my name being lip-synched by someone pointing at me. It comes with. But do I have to run frompaparazzi? No. They want the young, handsome guy with the hot chick. Not the short graying man who walks alone. I’m so not interesting to these people. I can’t tell you how little they give a fuck, which is fine. It allows me to do what I need to do.”

And what he does, whatever and whenever, he usually does alone.

“The girls in my office say that I’m dysfunctional and I’m losing the plot,” he says. “[They say that], ‘you don’t know anyone. Your phone doesn’t ring.’ And they’re right. I go out on Friday and buy a whole weekend’s worth of food and I hope that the phone doesn’t ring. I do a whole weekend’s worth of reading and writing and thinking. The girls in the office say I don’t know how to relate, but I get the work done. I’ve always lived alone. I’m the loner type. It makes sense to me. I have no interest in being married. There used to be a lot of rumors about me being gay because there was not a chick on my arm, but I’m completely heterosexual. I’m just really discreet.”

That, and one large caveat: “No female would sign my pre-nup.”

The man walks alone, but he’s earned the path. He recalls something David Lee Roth had said, and he paraphrases, “you sometimes get shit from the guys at the watering hole who say, ‘it must be nice’ referring to your lifestyle. And [Roth] says, hey, we all started off as seniors in high school. You went for your dad’s bank job. I went for art. You took the easy road. I rolled the dice. Don’t be mad at me.”

However, just because he walks alone, doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a careful eye on you. Rollins is a regular Yankee Doodle Dandy, with the emphasis on the do or die. He says, “You gotta be a good American. You gotta help the old lady up the stairs. The cold guy gets a blanket. We all pitch in, whether you’re making $2.50 an hour or $2 million a year. I consider every American my countryman. Even if they’re in the Klan or not. They are my neighbor. I may not like them, but at the end of the day, I have their back. Bush, for instance: I’m not a fan. If he was hungry, could he have half my sandwich? Absolutely. I don’t like him, but I don’t want him to starve to death. I just want him to get a new job.”

Rollins sees his life as a series of new jobs, which keeps him from getting stale or soft. Of other performers who may not have his constitution, he states sadly, “[They] go out on the stage and you pour it out. And then they say goodnight and get so lonely afterwards. That’s why performers get into really bad self-abuse cycles. To come down from that performing thing, you either want company, or some kind of sedative…anything to get you down from it. Because it’s such an up. I can see the appeal of heroin. I can see the appeal of booze. Or people surrounding you and saying you’re great.”

Stating that he essentially lives his life like Indiana Jones, he says, “I just pick a country and I go. I’ve been all over Asia and Africa by myself. I just go. Yes, I’m very fortunate — but at least I’m not blowing it on dope.”

The workaholism that seeks to destroy him only serves to make him stronger, to the satisfaction of his millions of fans, now spanning generations. He says, “If there is work to be done, I’m doing it. You always learn something.”

 

This article originally ran in Popentertainment.com.

 

Categories
The Interviews

Alicia Witt

Alicia Witt has been steadily holding on to her day job – that of an extremely successful working actor – until she can make real her dream job: that of singer-songwriter. That goal is becoming ever more realized now that she has debuted her self-titled EP and its well-received first single, “Anyway.”

“Making my own music has been a dream of mine for my entire life,” she confesses to me from her home in LA. “Three years ago, I finally just started doing it. All of the sudden, there were all these songs, and the more I write, the more come out. I can’t compare this time to any other time in my life because I feel that there was something missing in all the years before that.”

This new completeness – this wholeness – can be considered closure on all those “missing” years, which she attempted to fulfill with gigs on television and in movies.

In fact, you’ll recognize this redheaded stunner from any number of obscure little projects, such as The Sopranos, Friday Night Lights, Law and Order, Cybill, Ally McBeal, Twin Peaks, and even That’s Incredible. You may have also seen her in films like Dune, Four Rooms and Mr. Holland’s Opus.

However, like a good deal of art, the joy of creativity had sprung from the depths of pain and heartache.

“[The single] ‘Anyway,’ came about at the end of a really toxic relationship,” she says. “I started writing the song when things were really bad, with the understanding that the relationship was over. Still, I was trying to figure out why it had ended and why it had happened in the first place; how I could get myself into a place in my life where I was okay with being in a situation like that. And as I was writing the song, I was like, ‘I don’t really care anymore. It doesn’t matter. It’s over. There is no point in figuring out why or how.’”

The how and the why may not matter, but to Witt, the truth always does.

“There is not anything in the song that isn’t true,” she says. “In writing my own songs, even if I feel that it’s not something specific that happened to me, which this one is, I always want the words to be true. I’ll never put a lyric in because it rhymes or it fits. I would rather spend a really long time agonizing over the right lyrics so that it works with the music but also means what I wanted it to mean.”

The subject of the song, who shall remain nameless, is long gone, but the memories linger on (and some of them not so bad).

“We’re not in touch anymore,” she says of her former love. “I guess if he heard it, he would recognize the scenario. But some really great things can come out of breakups. I’m really grateful for the relationship for many reasons. I think everything happens for a reason. It’s so cool to be able to turn something like that into a song.”

Witt’s distinctive take on her newfound creative path reflects other aspects of her unique life, including her unusual career, education and even her taste in music.

“When I was growing up, I was kind of weird musically,” she says. “I loved the big band era more than anything. It was almost like I was born in 1941. I know all of those lyrics and singers. And I love Nat King Cole and songwriters like George Gershwin and Cole Porter. There was actually a radio station back home that I was a little obsessed with, [big-band format] WNEB. I listened to that station morning, noon and night.

“My mom listened to a lot of the sixties-style stuff, like the early Beatles. It wasn’t until I was much older, a teenager, that I started appreciating The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. There were some current pop songs that I loved, like ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart.’ For the most part, I was listening to big band music. I also loved piano-driven singer-songwriters like Elton John and Billy Joel and even Barry Manilow. I do think he’s a great songwriter.”

Before her eventual move to LA as a teenager, Witt was home-schooled in Worcester, Massachusetts by her parents, both of whom were teachers. Fun fact: her mom was once listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as having the longest hair in the world, at twelve feet (and she wore it in an updo).

“Home schooling was definitely better in some ways,” she says, “because my parents’ philosophy was that they wanted their kids to explore whatever they were most interested in at any given time. I studied classical piano very seriously. I didn’t have any particular curriculum to stick to. It wasn’t a regimented kind of education where we studied history and math and geography every day. It was more like I would find a chapter in a history book that interested me and I would read that for a week. We didn’t have tests. It was really unconventional, and I did know that. At that time, home schooling was not done nearly as much as it is today.”

Her TV debut, at age five, was on the ABC series That’s Incredible, where she – incredibly – recited Shakespeare. The nation responded by exclaiming, “That’s incredible!”

“It was my first time in front of an audience,” she recalls. “I can still remember the feeling I had the moment the audience responded to something that I had done. I was sort of astounded. I was doing a scene from Romeo and Juliet, with the host, John Davidson, as Romeo. He had his little pocket Shakespeare book that he was reading from. I remember that he had a long-stemmed rose that he was going to give me as part of the reading. At one point, he went to give me the rose, and he asked me if Romeo gave Juliet a rose and I said no, it wasn’t in the play. And so he tossed it over his shoulder.”

Among those watching this broadcast were film director David Lynch’s people, who were having a heck of a time casting a certain child character for his upcoming Dune movie adaption.

She says, “They had difficulty casting the role of a five-year-old who could speak in an incredibly adept way. [The character’s] mother had drunk this magic potion, the Water of Life. It gave the daughter all of this knowledge that she wasn’t supposed to have. The casting director thought that because I could read Shakespeare, I must be able to do this. I went to New York for the casting. It was like a dream. It was the first time that I realized that acting was a viable career option. I always loved acting, but I didn’t know that it was a possibility. I knew from that point on that I wanted to do that for the rest of my life. Before that, I thought I was going to be a painter and have a farm and run a restaurant and be a governess.”

She worked with Lynch again in Twin Peaks, his enormously successful foray into weekly television. The series baffled and confounded the country, but hooked millions of obsessed fans.

“David had actually written a part for me because we worked together on Dune,” Witt says. “My mother had gotten in touch with him when we moved to LA. At that time, I was basically trying to get an agent. I wasn’t a child actor. I just did that one film at age seven. [My character on Twin Peaks] played the piano; I’m still not exactly sure why she was dressed in a princess outfit and wearing a tiara. I didn’t really watch TV much, but I was excited to get the work with David.”

Despite her lack of attention to television, she had spent a lot time on it if not in front of it. By the mid-nineties, she had landed a regular role on the Cybill Shepherd sitcom, Cybill, playing the star’s quirky, cynical daughter.

“That was the first job I had that allowed me to quit my day job as a pianist at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel,” Witt says. “It was a very, very, very big deal for me. I will always remember the day I got the part. I had gone through all these auditions and then there was a network test. There were all these people in suits sitting around staring at me. I had gone in and done my scenes the same way I had done them in the past five auditions. It was the final round, so basically I was either going to get it or not get it. I walked out of there thinking, ‘well, I did my best.’ About thirty seconds later, I was walking to my car and I heard a voice behind me call my name and it was Cybill. She was walking toward me with a few of the producers behind her and she said, ‘Congratulations, honey, you’ve got it! I just wanted to tell you!’ I screamed so loud. I called all my friends!”

The highly regarded series was also a chance for her to display her musical chops (while playing “Chopsticks!”).

She recalls, “There was a piano on the set, and I don’t think it ever came up in meetings that I played the piano. When we were doing rehearsals for the pilot, they figured I might as well be playing the piano, because it was there. They worked out a little skit where I started out playing this complicated Mendelssohn piece, and then Cybill walks in and I started playing ‘Chopsticks.’”

There were exceptions to her little-or-no-TV rule; for instance, she was already a fan of the heavily-music-packedcomedy-drama Ally McBeal before she was cast in the show.

“I was really excited to be on it and that came about because I was a huge Ally McBeal fan,” she says. “It was one of the only times that I genuinely felt star struck. There have only been a few shows in my life that I have watched religiously. I’m much more into watching movies than I am television. I wanted to make sure I was home every Monday night to watch it. I was obsessed with it.”

She also became hooked after the fact, like when she became a Sopranos fan after she landed the role as a film exec who “helps” Christopher (Michael Imperioli) with his screenplay.

“I didn’t watch The Sopranos until I was on it,” she says, “I went back and watched it and became addicted. The experience was great. I felt like I was making a movie. There was a great crew and there was plenty of time to do as many takes as we needed. It was a very different process [than what I was used to with previous shows]. I realized that TV was changing a lot. It felt like shooting scenes in a movie. The lighting was beautiful and the acting was realistic and the writing was among the best I’ve ever read. I loved Michael Imperioli so much. He is really, really magical to work with.”

Movies figured into her career as well. She was part of a number of successful films post-Dune, including the classic Mr. Holland’s Opus, about the life and career of a high-school music teacher, starring Richard Dreyfuss.

She says, “I had a special connection to that film because it was not just about music, but it was about teachers. There was so much in it that my dad had gone through, even though my dad wasn’t a music teacher; he was a science teacher. To me, it was more about teachers than it was about music, specifically. I was just excited to get to work with Richard Dreyfuss, who I think is a great actor. He was really nurturing to me but he never talked down. He really encouraged me and made me feel very welcome. After he was nominated for an Oscar for that role, he took everyone in the cast and crew out to dinner. He reserved a restaurant for the whole bunch of us. He made a speech thanking us, saying that he would not have been nominated without us.”

Witt’s current TV project is Friday Night Lights, the acclaimed series that will air its final season this year. Here, she continues her streak of playing unusual characters in high-quality shows.

“I play basically white trash, which is really fun,” she says. “My character had a kid when she was in high school. She’s now in her thirties and she has a fifteen-year-old daughter. She is not the most responsible mother in the world, to say the least. She really tries her best but she makes some really messed-up judgment calls. She doesn’t think anything of having random guys come out of her bedroom early in the morning when her daughter is getting ready for school. She dresses way age-inappropriate. She has a really good heart, but she makes some questionable decisions. I completely loved playing her.

“I could not be prouder to be a part of [Friday Night Lights]. I’ve never worked on anything like it before. They have three cameras shooting at once. There is not really any blocking or rehearsal. There is an energy of complete realism about it that I don’t think it can be compared to anything, not even the more realistic type of film. It’s not even documentary style; it’s like these cameras are just placed around, capturing moments in people’s lives. As an actor, you don’t even know where the camera is going to be because it moves around from take to take. You almost feel like there are no cameras. It’s completely brilliant. And there is so much improvising that happens. I mean, obviously there are unbelievable scripts that we work from but half the time the directors say, okay, just ignore the words and say whatever you want. I can’t stress enough how incredible the lack of continuity is. It’s so free. I think it really shows up in the work. You don’t feel like you’re watching actors.”

However, we will continue to watch Witt as she takes us down more fascinating, unpredictable roads, involving both her music and acting.

“I can’t believe it, not even today,” she says as she looks back at her acting career and looks forward to her singing career. “It’s such an incredible blessing. It’s a privilege to be able to do what I love for a living. I never, ever take that for granted or stop being amazed by it.”

 

This article originally ran in Popentertainment.com.