Steve has been busy in NYC


Daily News (New York)
April 29, 2004 Thursday
SPORTS FINAL EDITION
GOSSIP; Pg. 28
'FRIENDS' & FAMILY PLAN JEN AND BRAD WANT ROLE OF PARENTS NEXT
GEORGE RUSH AND JOANNA MOLLOY WITH BEN WIDDICOMBE

****

'DE-LOVELY' PORTER TALE OFFERS A NEW OUTCOME

Forty years after his death, Cole Porter is finally coming out.

Cafe society always knew of the composer's sexual ambivalence. But most people swallowed the Hollywood version of his marriage to wife Linda, as portrayed by Cary Grant and Alexis Smith in the 1946 movie "Night and Day." As recently as 1990, there were worries at Porter's estate that the use of his songs on the "Red, Hot & Blue" AIDS-relief album would mark him as gay. The estate ultimately supported the hit CD by waiving royalties.

Now comes "De-Lovely," in which Kevin Kline shares a bed

at different times with Ashley Judd (as Linda Porter) and a male ballet dancer. "There are different kinds of love," Kline reminds us. "It would have been bad for business if Cole had been outed [during his lifetime]. He was a private guy. He never apologized for [being gay]. But he never advertised it, either. "

Writer Jay Cocks says Porter "may actually have been more promiscuous" than his film suggests, but "I really felt that Linda was the love of his life." Director Irwin Winkler artfully blends Porter's story with performances by Kline, Alanis Morissette, Robbie Williams, Natalie Cole, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello and Diana Krall. The Oscar-winning director gave a sneak peak Tuesday night to friends including Kline's wife, Phoebe Cates, Steve Martin, Martin Scorsese, Alan Alda, Barbara Walters, Barry Diller, Charles Grodin, Don Hewitt, Pete Peterson and Mort Zuckerman.

The delightful, delicious "De-Lovely" is the closing-night feature at the Cannes Film Festival, May 12-23.
- posted by sookeyjane 4/29/2004 11:16:00 PM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

More about the Caine fest in NYC


The New York Post
April 28, 2004 Wednesday
All Editions; Pg. 10
HAPPY EX-PAT

MICHAEL Caine began to love America at age 7 in war-torn London, when an older friend persuaded him to say hello to an American G.I. who gave him a piece of gum.

Caine, honored Monday night by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, said he and his friend subsequently cleaned and swept up - for pennies - a U.S. Army barracks. There, he read the soldiers' magazines - Life, Look, and the Saturday Evening Post - which made him obsessed with America and its people. Steve Martin drew laughs when he said he took the role co-starring with Caine in "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" without reading the script beyond the words, "Setting: South of France."

- posted by sookeyjane 4/29/2004 11:10:00 PM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

Steve at the tribute to Michael Caine


from whence came the mustachioed photos

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/28/nyregion/28bold.html?ex=1083816000&en=315689408564d291&ei=5006&partner=ALTAVISTA1
BOLDFACE NAMES
We Are the Bob Woodwards of the Gala Circuit
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON With Kari Haskell and Melena Z. Ryzik
April 28, 2004


****
In Reykjavik

"I know why I am here tonight," said STEVE MARTIN at the Film Society of Lincoln Center's tribute to MICHAEL CAINE. "I know why PHILLIP NOYCE is here. I know why IAN HOLM is here. I do not know why the president of Iceland is here."

As we would later learn, OLAFUR RAGNAR GRIMSSON, a jolly-looking man, had met Mr. Caine a few years ago when Mr. Grimsson went out with DORRIT, one of SHAKIRA CAINE's best friends. Mr. Grimsson's speech displayed that famous Icelandic wit, with jokes about Miramax and HOWARD DEAN. BENJAMIN BRATT was there, as well as ANDREA MARCOVICCI, who co-starred with Mr. Caine in a cult horror movie called "The Hand" (much better, Ms. Marcovicci said, than her other cult horror movie, "The Stuff").

"I've been practicing humility all day," Mr. Caine said in his speech. "It's very difficult for someone who's been an actor for 40 years."

And Mr. Martin: "There have been very few times in my life when I've worked on a film and woke up in the morning and thought, 'Oh boy, I get to spend all day with that person.' Once was when I was working alone. But in second place is GOLDIE HAWN. Michael, I wish 11th place had a better ring, but actually that's quite high."

- posted by sookeyjane 4/28/2004 01:28:00 PM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

Steve with his Clouseau mustache --Sacre Bleu!






- posted by sookeyjane 4/28/2004 12:17:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

Steve Boogies Down at Rushdie Wedding


India Today
May 3, 2004
The Global Indian: Salman Rushdie's Wedding; Pg.51
Down the Aisle to a new chapter
Anil Padmanabhan

They were Manhattan's odd couple. Salman Rushdie, arguably the world's most famous novelist, and Padma Lakshmi, a model, muse, cook and actor. One, the Mumbai chokra, now a middle-aged, balding icon, the exile who had outlived the fury of the mullahs; the other, the Chennai girl who has made it big on the ramps of New York. On April 17, they took the sacred vows at a civil ceremony in Chelsea-the chic art district in Lower West Manhattan. The summer wedding with an eastern soul and western chic could have been a perfect piece from a Rushdie novel.

At Peter White Studios every bit was taken care of by Marcy Blum, Manhattan's veteran wedding planner. Dressed in a black sherwani and a scarf, the thrice-divorced Rushdie looked picture postcard Indian groom. But if the limo driver is to be believed, the writer, during the short drive from his Park Avenue residence to the Studios, was more concerned about the killing of Hamas leader Abdel Rantisi.

When Lakshmi made her entry, it was clear that the London tabloids had got it wrong. She was not dressed in the much-anticipated white sari. She was a purple story, draped Gujarati style. The model had also gone in for an elaborate hairdo. "I am very happy to be getting married," she announced.

The evening was celebrity-heavy: Hollywood star Steve Martin, filmmaker Ismail Merchant, super model Iman, writer William Dalrymple, former New Yorker editor Tina Brown and her publisher husband Harold Evans, columnist Christopher Hitchens, humorist Kathy Lette and businessman Sabeer Bhatia. The guests were all seated in concentric circles around the mandap. The groom walked in first, his son Milan by his side. After that five bridesmaids-four Americans and the other Lakshmi's sister-preceded the bride, showering rose petals. As she walked in, Lakshmi was laughing and talking to friends. Marina Alam, a disciple of Pandit Jasraj, sang bhajans and Bengali songs in the background.

There was a round of readings from Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Pablo Neruda, Shakespeare and the Rig Veda before the judge overseeing the civil marriage read the vows and the couple exchanged rings. Rushdie also went through the ritual of adorning his wife's feet with toe-rings.

By the time the 200-odd guests adjourned for dinner, the atmosphere was getting more celebratory. The food came from Bukhara Grill-recently the favourite of the Kal Ho Naa Ho crew. According to chef Bachan Rawat, Lakshmi had been tasting samples for one month. "She made a lot of changes," he said. It was a typical Indian fare with chicken curry, fish moili (Kerala), khada palak (Rajasthan) and dals for the main course and rabri, kulfi and gulab jamun for desserts.

As the dinner was winding up, Lakshmi made a quiet exit to the recreational vehicle parked on the street below to change into a Luca Orlandi dress. Almost an hour later she re-emerged, transformed stunning in white brocade. At the venue, the classical singer was replaced by DJ Rekha, New York's oldest desi disc jockey. The music moved on to R&B and hip-hop. Martin was all over the floor. When asked what he thought of the wedding, he turned around and said, "Wedding? Was that a wedding?" When the night wind flirted with Latte's skirt, she mischievously told her friend, "Ooh, that was my Marilyn Monroe moment."

And what kind of moment was it for 57-year-old Rushdie? There is a clue perhaps in his New York novel, Fury. The hero, a Mumbai-born historian of ideas, haunted by furies, makes Manhattan his new home. Sounds familiar? Rushdie is known for allegorising his own life. Into his life enters Neela, a traffic-stopping dark beauty. She is "the last big emotional gamble of his life". On Saturday night, fiction was not all that stranger than life.
- posted by sookeyjane 4/27/2004 11:29:00 PM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

A bit about that great pic of steve in a painted white tux


Annie Leibovitz: portrait of a portrait photographer; she brings a point of view that's surprising, sometimes startling - always arresting.

Folio: the Magazine for Magazine Management; 7/1/1988; Love, Barbara

You've seen her work in Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair; you've seen it in books and award-winning American Express print ads. And you can't forget it.

It's the work of Annie Leibovitz.

How does she get such memorable photographs: John Lennon in a fetal position, nude next to Yoko Ono; Whoopie Goldberg in a tub of milk; and so many others? It's not who she shoots--it's how.

Take the Leibovitz shots of Martina Navratilova.

"Every time 2 saw pictures of Martina, I saw her with make-up on and her hair done and it just looked so weird to me," says Leibovitz. "In my picture I wanted her strength to emerge. I wanted to slick her hair back and show her incredible face. I wanted to do a body study. When I met her, she said, 'Fine, let's do it.'"

What Leibovitz did not say is how she got pictures of Martina on the ground on all fours, screaming. "It's pretty amazing," she admits.

"The big mystery is no mystery," Leibovitz adds. "You just have to ask if the person is willing to do something. And usually, if you believe in your ideas strongly enough, you'll find that most people are willing to go along with you.

"I work with very talented and creative people," she says. "Half the outrageous ideas come from them."

Although Leibovitz shoots for advertisers--and is very selective about the work she accepts--her first love is editorial. And she works only with editors who give her tremendous freedom to explore a subject and determine the point of view. "When someone takes that away from me, I feel cheated."

Leibovitz signed a contract to work with Vanity Fair through 1990 because editor Tina Brown gives her that freedom. "Tina Brown is the reason I'm at the magazine," she says. "A magazine is about collaboration and I love it when we have great collaboration."

Leibovitz also thinks Tina Brown has a great sense of timing. "She has ideas about doing things when other people aren't doing them," says Leibovitz. "She can't see things visually, but I trust her ideas more than anyone else's at the magazine."

Leibovitz also likes how her photos work in magazines. "It's not just art," she says. "The photos give you some information, some story. I never thought of photographs as something to be put on the wall."

A lesson on covers

When it comes to visualizing covers. Leibovitz learned a good lesson from Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. "I kept thinking people bought the magazine because of the unusual picture on the cover," she says. "It was a big shock for me to find out that it was the person, not the picture, that sold the magazines.

"I took a picture of Steve Martin standing in front of this Franz Kline painting. We painted his white tux so he looked like he was part of the painting. I fought for it to be on the cover, but I was told with a figure that small, people wouldn't buy the magazine.

"Jann let me have my way. That was the worst-selling issue of the year." But to this day, that's one of her favorite photographs.

For a good cover, Leibovitz concludes, it's important that the idea is "simple and graphic and have a great impact--and the person has to be recognizable."
From natural to stylized--and back

Today, the Leibovitz approach is changing, as she returns to the less stylized approach she had earlier in her career. "I feel I've come full circle," she says.

When she started out in this business 19 years ago, Leibovitz called herself a street photographer. Her work, though, wasn't exactly photojournalism, she realized, because it had a point of view.

Cover shots for Rolling Stone led Leibovitz in a new direction. Her work became more stylized. "With covers, you start directing people," she says. Her portfolio filled with dramatic, but posed, images.

"I now think just doing somebody nude, for example, can be just as pleasing as doing something a little more off the wall or a little more set up," she says. "But I like to think that I have a vocabulary of styles I can draw from and they can all be used at any time."

Her new approach, which she calls "softer," is partly a result of her work with Perry Merkley, art director on the Kelly award-winning American Express campaign through Ogilvy & Mather. Although Merkley let her do a lot of stylized photos, he preferred--and Leibovitz began to like more and more--the natural poses. The first photo in the campaign to reflect the change showed Tip O'Neill on the beach, his head turned away from the camera for an instant.

Today, Leibovitz enjoys "just watching people do what they do." Take her recent photographs of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore in Vanity Fair: In no picture is either of them looking at the camera. Readers feel they are eavesdropping.

A self-portrait

But how would this great portrait photographer, now 39, approach a self-portrait?

Leibovitz reluctantly admitted having done a self-portrait in 1984 when her station wagon was stuck in desert sand. "It was like the truth of what things are like," she says. But that's not what she would do today.

"I've been thinking lately that I'd like to do a self-portrait standing completely nude, my hair pulled back straight, looking straight into the camera--kind of a record of my body. It's not supposed to be flattering, just a person--like one of those surrealistic paintings."

Where might that be published? "You asked about a self-portrait," she says, "and I think that's really for oneself."


It's the work of Annie Leibovitz.

How does she get such memorable photographs: John Lennon in a fetal position, nude next to Yoko Ono; Whoopie Goldberg in a tub of milk; and so many others? It's not who she shoots--it's how.

Take the Leibovitz shots of Martina Navratilova.

"Every time 2 saw pictures of Martina, I saw her with make-up on and her hair done and it just looked so weird to me," says Leibovitz. "In my picture I wanted her strength to emerge. I wanted to slick her hair back and show her incredible face. I wanted to do a body study. When I met her, she said, 'Fine, let's do it.'"

What Leibovitz did not say is how she got pictures of Martina on the ground on all fours, screaming. "It's pretty amazing," she admits.

"The big mystery is no mystery," Leibovitz adds. "You just have to ask if the person is willing to do something. And usually, if you believe in your ideas strongly enough, you'll find that most people are willing to go along with you.

"I work with very talented and creative people," she says. "Half the outrageous ideas come from them."

Although Leibovitz shoots for advertisers--and is very selective about the work she accepts--her first love is editorial. And she works only with editors who give her tremendous freedom to explore a subject and determine the point of view. "When someone takes that away from me, I feel cheated."

Leibovitz signed a contract to work with Vanity Fair through 1990 because editor Tina Brown gives her that freedom. "Tina Brown is the reason I'm at the magazine," she says. "A magazine is about collaboration and I love it when we have great collaboration."

Leibovitz also thinks Tina Brown has a great sense of timing. "She has ideas about doing things when other people aren't doing them," says Leibovitz. "She can't see things visually, but I trust her ideas more than anyone else's at the magazine."

Leibovitz also likes how her photos work in magazines. "It's not just art," she says. "The photos give you some information, some story. I never thought of photographs as something to be put on the wall."

A lesson on covers

When it comes to visualizing covers. Leibovitz learned a good lesson from Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. "I kept thinking people bought the magazine because of the unusual picture on the cover," she says. "It was a big shock for me to find out that it was the person, not the picture, that sold the magazines.

"I took a picture of Steve Martin standing in front of this Franz Kline painting. We painted his white tux so he looked like he was part of the painting. I fought for it to be on the cover, but I was told with a figure that small, people wouldn't buy the magazine.

"Jann let me have my way. That was the worst-selling issue of the year." But to this day, that's one of her favorite photographs.

For a good cover, Leibovitz concludes, it's important that the idea is "simple and graphic and have a great impact--and the person has to be recognizable."

From natural to stylized--and back

Today, the Leibovitz approach is changing, as she returns to the less stylized approach she had earlier in her career. "I feel I've come full circle," she says.

When she started out in this business 19 years ago, Leibovitz called herself a street photographer. Her work, though, wasn't exactly photojournalism, she realized, because it had a point of view.

Cover shots for Rolling Stone led Leibovitz in a new direction. Her work became more stylized. "With covers, you start directing people," she says. Her portfolio filled with dramatic, but posed, images.

"I now think just doing somebody nude, for example, can be just as pleasing as doing something a little more off the wall or a little more set up," she says. "But I like to think that I have a vocabulary of styles I can draw from and they can all be used at any time."

Her new approach, which she calls "softer," is partly a result of her work with Perry Merkley, art director on the Kelly award-winning American Express campaign through Ogilvy & Mather. Although Merkley let her do a lot of stylized photos, he preferred--and Leibovitz began to like more and more--the natural poses. The first photo in the campaign to reflect the change showed Tip O'Neill on the beach, his head turned away from the camera for an instant.

Today, Leibovitz enjoys "just watching people do what they do." Take her recent photographs of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore in Vanity Fair: In no picture is either of them looking at the camera. Readers feel they are eavesdropping.

A self-portrait

But how would this great portrait photographer, now 39, approach a self-portrait?

Leibovitz reluctantly admitted having done a self-portrait in 1984 when her station wagon was stuck in desert sand. "It was like the truth of what things are like," she says. But that's not what she would do today.

"I've been thinking lately that I'd like to do a self-portrait standing completely nude, my hair pulled back straight, looking straight into the camera--kind of a record of my body. It's not supposed to be flattering, just a person--like one of those surrealistic paintings."

Where might that be published? "You asked about a self-portrait," she says, "and I think that's really for oneself."

- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 03:57:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

More Godot


Waiting for Godot. (Lincoln Center, New York) (theater reviews)
The Nation; 12/19/1988; Disch, Thomas M.

Theaters and audiences could be kept supplied for an indefinite period from the wealth already available. And repertory companies do keep that wealth in circulation. At the beginning of the current season there were no fewer than twenty revivals running or about to open in New York City. More than half of these were for runs limited to a month or less. Many, admittedly, of the more ephemeral productions have an audience in mind only secondarily, their chief purpose being to provide on-the-job training for aspiring actors and directors. But often as not the dramatic fare that's served up is palatable if not gourmet, and so nonfinicky playgoers who are attentive to the listings in The Village Voice or the Sunday edition of The New York Times should be able to attend revivals three or four times a week all year round. Such a playgoer in the week of November 6 would have been able to select from a menu including Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, Gogol, Chekhov, Otway, O'Neill, Beckett, Claudel and others of less than canonical stature.

The hot ticket among these was Waiting for Godot. Its all-star cast had committed themselves to so short a run that a goodly number of the Lincoln Center subscribers were unable to get seats. The Times's Frank Rich did what he could to mollify their sense of miff by pronouncing the production unworthy of Beckett's genius, while in The New Yorker Mimi Kramer gave so circumstantial an account of the staging that no one who read it need admit to the shame of not having been there. In conclusion she wondered whether we lucky few who saw this Godot will look back in years to come and say we were there when. Will we mythologize Robin Williams's Estragon as "those who saw the original production-even those who admit there was nothing special about it -reminisce about seeing Bert Lahr?" "Probably," she answers herself, but only from a need to "come away with something after so much fuss."

Without going into raptures, I must say I thought it merrier than that. If Mike Nichols has exerted himself to inject more laughter into the play than the text might suggest to a close (i.e., academic) reader, that is what directors are paid to do: invent, enrich, extrapolate, intensify and, most of all, entertain. They are also arbitrators of the conflicting interests of author and actors, a conflict likely to be resolved in the actors' favor, especially when the author has absconded, like a god, from the scene of his creation. Nichols undoubtedly allows Steve Martin and Robin Williams to put their own Martin and Williams trademark stamps on their roles, but surely that is what they were hired to do. It is Beckett's play that must prove adaptable to their requirements, not the other way round, for it is part of what makes a play great (i.e., universal) that it can accommodate the local accidents of casting. If Waiting for Godot is the masterpiece it's cracked up to be, then it should work as a vehicle for the talents of two such accomplished and intelligent clowns. And so, by and large, it does. The audience has a lot to laugh at, and one scene of sustained comic splendor, with Bill Irwin as the malfunctioning sherpa Lucky, careens out of control - a scene that for all its textual density may most aptly be likened to the inspired comic choreography of the star clown of the Cirque du Soleil, Denis Lacombe. Indeed, it will almost certainly be Irwin, not Williams, who'd be accounted legendary for this Godot.

The problem that Martin and Williams face is that so much of their material is portentous or dull. Beckett had not yet pared his art down to an exiguous minimum, nor was he sure that people would understand that he was a Serious Dramatist if he did not strike a few classic poses. Vladimir and Estragon's theological discourse on the fate of the thieves hung with Christ is a vermiform appendix of Beckett's Catholic upbringing; it is an alien presence in the Godot world, otherwise so carefully flensed of historic particularities. Similarly, Vladiniies Act II speculations on where they are and what they've done are a mistake: It's like a flashing sign above the stage saying: YOU ARE ENTERING A DREAMWORLD. WATCH OUT FOR SYMBOLS! These are small imperfeccussion of the fallacy of so-called masculine or feminine styles with the contradictory suggestion that no appropriate "language of form" exists for women. Traditional definitions of art are "intellectual distortions" reflecting the "unstated domination of white male subjectivity." In other words, women should not be judged by "male" standards of quality. By insinuating a false opposition between women's abilities and concepts of quality, the argument is protectionist and retrogade. Its implications recall Van Vechten and the glamour of Negroness.

A rationale that absolved women from the history of human excellence was a brilliant expediency for a movement seeking the strength of numbers. What Nochlin once derided as "the Lady's Accomplishment" ("a modest, proficient, self-demeaning level of amateurism") was transformed by scholarly fiat into womanart and the Feminist's Accomplishment: an immodest, not necessarily proficient, self-assertive level of amateurism that coincided nicely with camp's assault on taste. Less a revolution than a promotional tactic, the feminist art movement was one more trick of the bazaar characteristic of the culture it presumed to subvert. A candid appraisal of that movement and of Nochlin's role in it would be valuable. But Nochlin has ascended into certitude leaving criticism behind under interdict. She pumps the same dismal list of names, including the adolescent Sylvia Sleigh (wife of influential critic Lawrence Alloway), that signals a discernment quarantined by clubhouse politics. She barely nods to gifted women-Nancy Grossman, Sandra MacKintosh, Nell Blaine, Lenore Tawney, scores of others -who do not have the required ideology or the party circuit to run interference for their work. Certainly Barbara Hepworth, too long in the shadow of Henry Moore, deserves more than passing reference.

The historical spirit is critical but the burden of these essays is catechetical. In the cope and chasuble of a doubly ordained Art Feminist, Nochlin is as revolutionary as a 1950s Catholic. Back then, ardent nuns devised apologetics classes to prove Darwin wrong. High-school students were exempt from the biology Regents, taking the diocesan substitute instead. The Catholic intellect did not measure itself by secular standards and the Legion of Decency went to the movies with the same barren disapproval Nochlin bring's to unsanctioned art.

The existing stock of dramatic literature is such that, were all living playwrights to succumb en masse to writer's block theaters and audiences could be kept supplied for an indefinite period from the wealth already available. And repertory companies do keep that wealth in circulation. At the beginning of the current season there were no fewer than twenty revivals running or about to open in New York City. More than half of these were for runs limited to a month or less. Many, admittedly, of the more ephemeral productions have an audience in mind only secondarily, their chief purpose being to provide on-the-job training for aspiring actors and directors. But often as not the dramatic fare that's served up is palatable if not gourmet, and so nonfinicky playgoers who are attentive to the listings in The Village Voice or the Sunday edition of The New York Times should be able to attend revivals three or four times a week all year round. Such a playgoer in the week of November 6 would have been able to select from a menu including Shakespeare, Shaw, Ibsen, Gogol, Chekhov, Otway, O'Neill, Beckett, Claudel and others of less than canonical stature.

The hot ticket among these was Waiting for Godot. Its all-star cast had committed themselves to so short a run that a goodly number of the Lincoln Center subscribers were unable to get seats. The Times's Frank Rich did what he could to mollify their sense of miff by pronouncing the production unworthy of Beckett's genius, while in The New Yorker Mimi Kramer gave so circumstantial an account of the staging that no one who read it need admit to the shame of not having been there. In conclusion she wondered whether we lucky few who saw this Godot will look back in years to come and say we were there when. Will we mythologize Robin Williams's Estragon as "those who saw the original production-even those who admit there was nothing special about it -reminisce about seeing Bert Lahr?" "Probably," she answers herself, but only from a need to "come away with something after so much fuss."

Without going into raptures, I must say I thought it merrier than that. If Mike Nichols has exerted himself to inject more laughter into the play than the text might suggest to a close (i.e., academic) reader, that is what directors are paid to do: invent, enrich, extrapolate, intensify and, most of all, entertain. They are also arbitrators of the conflicting interests of author and actors, a conflict likely to be resolved in the actors' favor, especially when the author has absconded, like a god, ftom the scene of his creation. Nichols undoubtedly allows Steve Martin and Robin Williams to put their own Marin and Williams trademark stamps on their roles, but surely that is what they were hired to do. It is Beckett's play that must prove adaptable to their requirements, not the other way round, for it is part of what makes a play great (i. e. , universal) that it can accommodate the local accidents of casting. If Waiting for Godot is the masterpiece it's cracked up to be, then it should work as a vehicle for the talents of two such accomplished and intelligent clowns. And so, by and large, it does. The audience has a lot to laugh at, and one scene of sustained comic splendor, with Bill Irwin as the malfunctioning sherpa Lucky, careens out of control - a scene that for aB its textual density may most aptly be likened to the inspired comic choreography of the star clown of the Cirque du Soleil, Denis Lacombe. Indeed, it will almost certainly be Irwin, not Williams, who'd be accounted legendary for this Godot.

The problem that Martin and Williams face is that so much of their material is portentous or dull. Beckett had not yet pared his art down to an exiguous minimum, nor was he sure that people would understand that he was a Serious Dramatist if he did not strike a few classic poses. Vladimir and Estragon's theological discourse on the fate of the thieves hung with Christ is a vermiform appendix of Beckett's Catholic upbringing; it is an alien presence in the Godot world, otherwise so carefully flensed of historic particularities. Similar Iy, Vladimir's Act II speculations on where they are and what they've done are a mistake: It's like a flashing sign above the stage saying: YOU ARE ENTERING A DREAMWORLD. WATCH OUT FOR SYMBOLS! These are small imperfections.
- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 03:50:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

When Steve wasn't nominated for an Oscar


Can Oscar laugh?
People Weekly; 2/25/1985

Talk about a tough audience. Oscar, that 13-1/2-inch, 8-1/2-pound block of unsmiling gold-plated metal, is a real hard case when it comes to clowns. Remember the acting art of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Lucille Ball, Cary Grant, Red Skelton, Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, Richard Pryor, Woody Allen? Oscar doesn't. Since Oscar became Hollywood's top take-home treat back in 1927, only three true comedies (It Happened One Night in 1934, You Can't Take It With You in 1938 and Annie Hall in 1977) have won the Best Picture prize.

This year was supposed to be different. This year was a virtual comic revolution, with more successful comedies onscreen than at any time since the 1930s. Ghostbusters, starring Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd, grossed an astonishing $221 million--the year's record--and reviewers reverently pronounced it a "classic." Words like "artist" were used to describe Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop, Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson, Dudley Moore in Micki & Maude, and Woody Allen and Mia Farrow in Broadway Danny Rose. Kathleen Turner revived screwball farce in Romancing the Stone, and director Ron Howard from TV's Happy Days made such a splash with his mermaid comedy that he practically saved Walt Disney studios from financial disaster.

Before the Academy announced its nominations two weeks ago, everyone expected several major break-throughs. Steve Martin, for one, had every right to expect a nomination for his work with Lily Tomlin in All of Me. As a lawyer with half his body controlled by Tomlin's sassy spirit, Martin's extraordinary physical high jinks made him Best Actor according to the prestigious National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle. Comedy thus was dubbed an art, and Martin dared to hope. "So many people are talking," he said, "they've got me all worked up."

Then the list was read and Martin's name was missing. There were screen-writing nominations for Beverly Hills Cop, Splash and Broadway Danny Rose, but not a comedy actor or film in the bunch. Oscar had frowned once again on its court jesters, and the defenders of the yuck responded with a round of Bronx cheers. "I was shocked that Steve Martin and Robin Williams weren't nominated," says Paul Mazursky, who directed Williams in Moscow on the Hudson. "The Academy tends to see things in terms of culture with capital 'K'. That sounds like sour grapes, and it is." Producer Dan (Foot-loose) Melnick says that Martin is "too successful" at making comedy look effortless. "The Academy attitude is, 'Why reward it? The guy's only being funny. What's the big deal?'"

Serious always wins points with Oscar. Perhaps that's why a dramatic actor slumming in comedy (Glenda Jackson in 1973's A Touch of Class or Richard Dreyfuss in 1977's The Goodbye Girl) can win an Oscar when a clown can't. "To a large extent, people vote based on guilt," says Melnick. "The pictures nomimated this year are worthwhile movies that most of the Academy didn't see, but think they should have. They're making peace with their maker to vote for A Passage to India because they had such a good time at Beverly Hills Cop."

Who are these voters? Right now the Academy has 4,500 performer and film production members. "Most of them are old, conservative and not a very adventuresome bunch," says comedy writer Buck (Protocol) Henry, who failed to pick up a nomination this year. Younger votes are not the answer for Henry. "They have trouble remembering yesterday, much less pithy wit. TV dialgous has deadened their ears. Gross is what they remember." One longtime Academy member, producer Howard (The Odd Couple) Koch, 68, denies that age has anything to do with favoring drama over comedy. But he does think Oscar's forgotten how to laugh. "Hell," says Koch, "I don't even think he chuckles anymore."

For many rejected clowns, the best revenge on Oscarhs indifference is to keep on working. "Comedy is a bit like the girl you go out with for a good time not being the one you wind up marrying," says Ron Howard. But Howard sees progress. "You don't have to be embarassed that you're making a comedy anymore." Harold Ramis, who missed out on acting and screenwriting nominations for Ghostbusters, sees more in comedy than critical respect or Oscar gold. "Some films are made for entertainment," says Ramis. "Box office success is its own reward." As far as Oscar is concerned, for now it will have to be.
- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 03:44:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

It's about Hockney, but Steve's in it (or it wouldn't be here)


Giving success a good name; Hockney's skill and wit create a consistent world. (English artist, David Hockney)
Time; 6/20/1988; Hughes, Robert

No other English artist has ever been as popular in his own time, with as many people, in as many places, as David Hockney. At 50, an age at which J.M.W. Turner was hardly known in France and Henry Moore was only just beginning to enter collections outside Britain, Hockney has the kind of celebrity usually reserved for film stars but rarely visited on serious artists -- Picasso and Warhol being the big exceptions. Merely to see his blond hair and round glasses across a crowded room, let alone hear his Yorkshire voice droning unstoppably on about Picasso, cubism and his own photography, turns the knees of collectors to jelly. When Actor Steve Martin pays $330,000 at auction for a medium-good, medium-size drawing of Andy Warhol by Hockney, as he did last month, one knows that some overriding program in the fame machinery has kicked in and will not soon be turned off.

No one has ever begrudged the artist his success. Hockney is that rarity, a painter of strong talent and indefatigable industry who has never struck the wearisome pose of il maestro and has been grounded, throughout his career, in the bedrock of Yorkshire common sense. Self-mockery may not be his long suit, but Hockney is the least arrogant of men, and his achievement, uneven though it looks, is a distinguished one. It can be assayed in the retrospective of some 200 works -- paintings, prints, drawings, photocollages, stage designs -- that, having originally been put together by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, opens this week at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

To think of Hockney is to think of pictorial skill and a total indifference (in the work, at least) to the dark side of human experience. Does the latter make him a less serious painter? Of course not, any more than it trivialized the work of that still underrated artist Raoul Dufy. At root, Hockney is popular because his work offers a window through which one's eye moves without strain or fuss into a wholly consistent world. That world has its cast of recurrent characters -- friends, lovers and family. Hockney's portraits of his parents, in particular, are full of unabashed filial devotion, and through repeated drawings and paintings he has given the portly form of his friend and promoter Henry Geldzahler an abiding recognizability: one knows that stomach like the knob of Mont Ste.-Victoire. And then, inseparable from Hockney's skill and lack of pretension, there is his candor about sexual matters, which is no more titillating today than it was shocking in the early '60s. It is simply there, part of the work, like Bonnard's liking for peaches.

Hockney was by no means the first English artist to make his homosexuality a theme of his art, but he was the first to do it in a garrulous, social way, treating his appetites as the most natural thing in the world and not, like Francis Bacon, as a pretext for reflection on Eros' power to maim and dominate. His code for the subject in the early '60s was graffiti. Flattened scrawly figures with sticks for limbs and blobs for heads, much influenced by Jean Dubuffet, populate a whole set of images from 1960 to 1963 -- Doll Boy, The Fourth Love Painting, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (a valentine to the pop singer Cliff Richard, on whom the artist had an unrequited crush), We Two Boys Together Clinging (a line from Walt Whitman, who, like Gandhi, was one of the heroes of Hockney's youth).

Often loosely called a pop artist, Hockney was only tangentially so. He did not care deeply about mass imagery. What did delight him was the modalities of fine art as they brushed against print and, later, photography. He loved formal impurity as long as it was clearly underwritten by formal skill. With his wiry line that defined shape while subliminally conveying its depth and weight, with his unfailing instinct for placement, he knew just where the metallic fronds of a palm should pop up in empty space, just how much of a figure in a shower could be elided by white lines of water. His hero of virtuosity was Picasso, whose work, he said, showed that ''style is something you can use, and you can be like a magpie, just taking what you want. The idea of the rigid style seemed to me then something you needn't concern yourself with; it would trap you.''

These early Hockneys, flat, offhand and laden with tropes, hold up very well after 25 years. Portrait Surrounded by Artistic Devices, 1965, is a witty protest against Cezanne's peculiar remark, elevated into a tedious orthodoxy by art teachers, that in nature one should look for geometry -- the sphere, the cone, the cylinder. So Hockney paints his father behind a pile of cubes and cylinders, with more such patches ranged on a shelf above his head. These ''devices'' are merely a pedantic clutter of spare parts without meaning; feeling, the portrait argues, matters more than formulas.

Hockney moved to Los Angeles, where he still lives, in 1964. Before long it became apparent that his paintings of El Lay were inventing the city, giving it a promptly recognizable, iconic form that no other painter had cottoned to. Just as, once you have seen their work, you cannot look at New York brownstones without Edward Hopper or at certain Paris locales without Edouard Manet, so Hockney's Los Angeles is quite indelible.

He did not always get the light right, but he fixed other things -- those pastel planes, insouciant scraggy palms, blank panes of glass, and blue pools full of wreathing reflections and brown bodies. A Bigger Splash, 1967, remains the quintessential L.A. painting, taut but inviting, like a friendly, dehistorified De Chirico in which the melancholy drag of Then has turned into a radiant acceptance of Now -- an eye blink, picture-perfect. The splash itself, in its strands, hatchings and squiggles of white, is Hockney's masterpiece of stylization. Anything could have gone wrong in it, but nothing did.

Although Hockney doted on L.A., he sometimes allowed himself a prod with the needle. American Collectors (Fred and Marcia Weisman), 1968, takes its relationships of figures and architecture from the Italian quattrocento, the ideal proportional world of Piero della Francesca. But then one notices that Marcia Weisman's lopsided smile echoes the toothy grimace of the Northwest Indian totem and that a dribble of paint has run down from her spouse's fist, as though he were crushing something small and warm to pulp.

Hockney's deepest interests as a painter lay with reaching an unforced calm beyond rhetoric, and in the late '60s and early '70s (as in the finely modulated Still Life on a Glass Table, 1971-72) he succeeded in doing so without a trace of pretension. Not all his later paintings have been as successful. His images of travel in Japan (flower arrangement in front of Mount Fuji; rain on canvas) seem facile and touristy by comparison, and a coarse, overdone glow began to seep into his portraiture. On the evidence of this show, Hockney was faltering somewhat by the late '70s.

He retrieved his momentum through photography and the theater. In photography, he took to reassembling a scene or a motif by taking hundreds of photographs of it, and then constructing a cubist patchwork out of these shifting, overlapping views. This, he believed, replicated for the viewer the actual process of scanning -- and so it did, in a fairly schematic way. Cubism linked up, in Hockney's mind, with the study of Chinese scrolls. He enjoyed the sense of traversing an image, rolling through it, taking the eye on a journey. His most ambitious effort to mimic that feeling, the big buckling panorama of his painting Mulholland Drive: The Road to the Studio, 1980, is by no means the masterpiece it has been taken for, but he did produce in Nichols Canyon, 1980, a soaring Dufyesque landscape of the Los Angeles hills (all fauve orange and blue, viridian, chrome yellow and black) that wrought his color to a new freshness and intensity.

That, in turn, was useful in the theater. Hockney was a natural stage designer. The distanced attitude of his work, the sense of the image as a proscenium of quotation with flat figures moving within the frame like puppets, guaranteed that. Since 1966, when he designed a London production of Alfred Jarry's farce Ubu Roi, he has done a stream of designs for opera and ballet, most recently Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, whose romantic sets with their plunging perspectives, sweeping sails and bombastically thickened architectural decor are lavishly represented by models at the Met.

Indeed, one may prefer Hockney's stage work to the present phase of his painting, which consists mainly of devotional pastiches of '30s Picasso in licorice-Allsorts color, some of them very slack indeed. The wall space occupied by some of these should have been sacrificed for a better look at his prints and graphics, which are one of the great strengths of Hockney's work and, except for the suite of etchings based on Hogarth's Rake's Progress, are not covered in the depth they deserve. But though parts of the show and its presentation disappoint, the whole does not: perhaps it is only because Hockney delights you so regularly that you feel vaguely cheated when, here and there, he fails to.
- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 03:39:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

Adam Sandler in Awe of Steve (as he should be)


Awed Adam. ('Saturday Night Live' star Adam Sandler meets former stars of show, which will be celebrating its 20th anniversary) (Brief Article)
Entertainment Weekly; 7/29/1994; Pearlman, Cindy

AWED ADAM: It's not Princess Di, but the cast of Saturday Night Live is a little gaga at the prospect of working with the show's past royalty. To celebrate SNL's 20th anniversary this fall, some former Not-Ready-For-Prime-Time Players have been invited to return and host, including Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray. "It's going to be surreal," says current SNL-er Adam Sandler. "Bill Murray came by recently to talk. There's nothing better than when Bill says, 'Hey, that thing you did was funny.'" Sandler, who just finished filming Lifesavers with Steve Martin, found himself tongue-tied in front of Martin, who will also join the festivities. "Steve would ask me a question," says Sandler. "I would just look at his lips moving. Steve was like, 'It's okay, Adam. You can talk.'"

ED. NOTE: Lifesavers was the prerelease name of Mixed Nuts

- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 03:37:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

He's always good at award shows


Chatter. (Little Richard) (column)
People Weekly; 2/15/1988; Castro, Peter

****
ROLL ON, COLUMBIA: Accepting his award as best actor for Roxanne at a Los Angeles Film Critics luncheon, Steve Martin remarked upon the many managements that ran Columbia Pictures while he was making Roxanne for the studio. ''I want to thank Guy McElwaine, the president of Columbia who gave the project the go,'' he said, ''Steve Sohmer, the next president of Columbia, who oversaw the casting phase, David Puttnam, the next president of Columbia, who was behind us all the way. And Dawn Steel, the now president of Columbia, who supervised the release on cassettes.'' Martin then told the audience: ''I just hope each of you will be as supportive when you're president of Columbia.''
- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 03:35:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

Comedians -- and Steve


Comedians have taken over Hollywood.
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service; 12/5/1994; Lee, Luaine

The comedians have taken over. When the industrial-strength Hollywood studios are searching around for their next star, they're likely to look at the comedy houses instead of the drama schools.

With the ascent of people such as Roseanne, Tim Allen, Emma Thompson, Robin Williams, Dana Carvey, Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg, Jim Carrey, Billy Crystal and Eddie Murphy, it seems obvious that the next best thing to four years at the Actors Studio is a stand-up routine that cracks them up in Kansas City.

Many of this year's Christmas movies are being helmed by comedians. With ``The Santa Clause'' Tim Allen not only launches his film career, he turns in a smashing debut performance.

This Christmas, Jim Carrey carries on his rubbery antics in ``Dumb and Dumber,'' Dana Carvey tethers his coltish mimicry to ``Trapped in Paradise'' and Steve Martin returns to comedies after a two-year hiatus with ``Mixed Nuts.''

Like the German cockroach, comedians are EVERYWHERE. When we need a toastmaster, a talk-show host or a voice for a new cartoon, where do we go? To the comedy clubs.

Just what makes them funny, they don't know. Madeline Kahn, who improvises a kooky rap song while trapped in an elevator in ``Mixed Nuts,'' says, ``It may be that people who are funny are somehow more in touch with some kind of inner discomfort or pain or whatever the angst is that we all have somewhere, and they may just be more in touch with that.''

Woody Allen, who thinks of himself more as a writer than a stand-up comic or actor, says his sense of humor was something he was born with.

``I definitely used to make amusing remarks in movie theaters or when watching films in class. I was not disruptive, but I was funny. ... I always had that ability,'' says Allen, who directed ``Bullets Over Broadway'' and writes, directs and stars in ``Don't Drink the Water,'' coming to ABC on Dec. 18.

Tim Allen figures maybe comics are cognizant of things around them earlier than other people.

``I think I was aware very early,'' he says, ``I think comedians are aware of things really quickly and are able to assimilate data real fast. Instead of just living that time, I actually was WATCHING myself live it, too.''

Jim Carrey says he had the impulse to perform since before he could read. ``My report card used to say: `Jim finishes his work first and then bothers the other students.' I was good in school. I used to whip through it. I had one teacher who had a meeting with me and gave me 15 minutes at the end of the day to do a routine.''

But Carrey believes that comedy comes from a darker side. ``Humor is a way to deal with pain,'' he says. ``When you watch, some people are prettier than others because maybe they don't let the pain get to them quite as much. When you watch a person and you know that they let life destroy their love of life, it becomes pornographic and you're repulsed by it. Life is good. But it's weird. That's my slant.''

For Dana Carvey, it's trial and error mixed with a generous dollop of good fortune. ``I have a knack for (comedy) like someone who's good with a hammer and nail, which I'm retarded at. That side of the brain is highly deficient.''

His facility with mimicry is something that he can't explain. ``When you can do a new impression, it's a present, because you don't know how it works,'' says Carvey.

He will practice with a new subject and it comes out all wrong, he says. ``I do it again, and it's still bad. Then I try again, and the next day, you're in the shower and it works.''

Roseanne, who started as a stand-up before she hit it big as the nation's favorite ``functional'' TV mom, admits that her comedy comes from some deep and shuttered place.

``I don't have any vested interest in keeping secrets or telling lies,'' she says, ``so my comedy is more dangerous than ever.''

Albert Brooks, who left stand-up because he thought it would drive him crazy, never veered far from humor. The creator of such hilarious films as ``Defending Your Life'' and ``Lost in America'' thinks that most comics are compensating for inner anguish.

``Anybody with real depth is crying on the inside,'' he roars. ``If you've got a brain you should be crying. It's a MESS out there. So, other than David Hasselhoff, I think most people are crying.''

But Martin Short, who's co-starring with Steve Martin in the sequel to ``Father of the Bride,'' thinks that comedy doesn't have to spring from inner turmoil.

``I'm the complete opposite of the comedian who works in angst,'' he says. ``From angst I get depressed. I'm the kind of comedian who's deeply happy.''

Robin Williams confesses that comedy always helped him cope with his timidity. ``There's a part of myself that is very terminally shy that I use comedy to overcome,'' he says. ``There is that (which helps) tap into that desperate fear of people.''

For Eddie Murphy, the source of humor is the acuity that Tim Allen talks about and the gift that Carvey describes. And though he has succeeded in films beyond his dreams, it's still stand-up that thrills him.

``Nothing can compare with what stand-up feels like,'' says Murphy. ``It's like all these different waves of energy coming at you when you do stand-up in front of a big audience. And you feel like it's a big, white glare and a roar, `Oh-h-h-h-h-h' ... And you get drunk off that.''

Many of the comedians who have moved into actors' greasepaint have proved themselves adroit at it. Some, such as Jackie Gleason, were brilliant. ``Comedians are good actors,'' says Billy Crystal. ``There's a gentleness to them and sensitivity. And they're smart. And there's a lotta pain in a lot of them. And they have something to show. Milton Berle is a very good actor, Don Rickles, Gleason and Jerry Lewis.''

To everyone's surprise, Joan Rivers demonstrated her dramatic fiber on Broadway in ``Broadway Bound.'' Billy Crystal stretched beyond his punchlines in ``Mr. Saturday Night.'' Tom Hanks was unforgettable in ``Big'' and will no doubt be Oscar-nominated this year for ``Forrest Gump.''

Whatever their technique or training, most comics agree that there is an inexplicable element to what they do. Deciding what's funny and what's not is instinctive, says Steve Martin.

``Comedy is something you never quite learn. You may think you know something and then you find out you don't. The one thing that always works for you -- that you can't quite express in a sentence -- is intuition. There can never be a comedy-instruction book. There probably never has been. It's just too mercurial.''

- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 03:21:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

Avedon photos of Steve


Just for the record, the photo of Steve with his hands together is seeming prayer on the home page of the site is one of these pics.


Richard Avedon: Evidence 1944-1994._(book reviews)
The New Republic; 6/13/1994; Perl, Jed

Richard Avedon: Evidence 1944-1994 (Whitney Museum of American Art, March 24-June 26, 1994; catalog published by Random House, 183 pp., $50)

An Autobiography by Richard Avedon (Random House, 432 pp., $100)

The book is called An Autobiography. The show is called "Evidence." These are blunt, hard-edged titles, and they're very much in line with the belligerent elegance of two enormous new gatherings of work by Richard Avedon. Avedon is probably America's best-known photographer, but to call Avedon a photographer is to reduce the message to the medium in a way that fits the case as inexactly as, say, it does to call Salvador Dale a painter. People who browse through Avedon's new book or go to see the retrospective of his work at the Whitney Museum in New York are probably not so interested in studying Avedon's photographs one by one as they are in getting in a little over their heads in what they think of as the Avedon experience.

This experience is defined but not circumscribed by the starkly efficient graphic impact of Avedon's photographs. Avedon's is a world of faces and more faces, famous and legendary faces and anonymous faces, faces alone, faces caught in a crowd. He's photographed everybody from Isak Dinesen to Barbra Streisand to an unemployed ranch hand named Clifford Feldner to Gerald Ford. To look at the work is to feel that one is being carried along by a man who has no patience with formalities or preliminaries--he's always in the thick of things, walking up to people, looking them in the eye. People may have reservations about the Avedon experience, but it's not easily forgotten. They understand that Avedon is offering them his visual equivalent of life in the fast track, and even the fainthearted want to get the feel of it.

****
Of the many well-known people whom Avedon has photographed for The New Yorker since becoming the magazine's first staff photographer in 1992, Steve Martin strikes me as the subject with whom Avedon has had the most success. The Martin photographs do something more than demonstrate Avedon's ability to remake anybody as an Avedon; they catch the wit and fluidity of Martin's movie persona. In a lot of Avedon's portraits the black edges of the images press in on the subject, so that there seems to be no space in which a person can move or even breathe. The men and women in Avedon's photographs often look like specimens that have been pinned down, glassed in. (Maybe Avedon hasn't put the photographs in the Whitney show under glass because he feels that he's glassed-in his subjects already.) What's inspiriting about the Martin photographs is that the actor retains his freedom. The camera doesn't press in so hard, there's more light and air in these photographs, there's a space in which a man can take up residence, move around. The result is an increase in photographic drama. Martin's dark jacket, silhouetted against Avedon's white ground, creates an animated, asymmetrical shape. The sharp lighting--with dark shadows working their chiaroscuro drama-- gives point to each flicker of an eyelid, each twist of a finger. Here Avedon's theatrical sense is attuned to his subject's theatricality, and the photographs become small essays in a mesmerizing contemporary comic style. The photographs are pure Steve Martin, but they're pure Avedon, too. Avedon's dramatic weight somehow underlines Martin's dramatic lightness. This is great celebrity photography.

The New Yorker apparently liked these photographs quite a lot. They used not one but a group of them, so that the magazine's readers had a sense of a little Steve Martin dance being performed before Avedon's camera. Avedon, however, does not think that the playful, upbeat allure of these photographs represents his work at its best. Not too long after they were published last November, Avedon remarked in an interview that these shots "are not pure expressions of myself." Martin, Avedon explained, "was enormously generous in the sitting, but there's no such thing as cutting through to Steve Martin. Steve Martin uses his comic genius like a wall. There's no penetrating it, and I respect that." Fair enough. But the line of argument leaves one wondering if what Avedon regards as penetration is not what some others regard as violation. That violation is apparently Avedon's way of expressing, over and over again, his centrality in the photographic process.

Avedon's observations suggest a paradox. Why would a portrait photographer even want his portraits of others to be a "pure expression of myself"? Did Avedon mean to prove his power over Coco Chanel by showing her as all "drainpipe"? Or, as Truman Capote asserts in the text for Observations, did Avedon reveal "the striving in the taut stem of her neck"? It's hard to tell. Avedon himself has said that the portraits are about "contradictions, dialogue, arguments. The soul's confusion on the face." This is his way of saying that there is elegance and there is embarrassment, the mask and the unmasking, and both are presented with the same intensity.
****
- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 03:17:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

The childless Steve per Victoria


Chatter. (Victoria Tennant) (column)
People Weekly; 6/24/1991; Castro, Peter

"I don't feel any less of a woman, any less fulfilled," actress Victoria Tennant said in London's Daily Mail about the fact that she and husband Steve Martin are childless. As to friends who have kids, Tennant, 40, said, "They have lost many of the things I have. They've lost the privacy of their home, of their marriage. They have a slightly different relationship with their husbands. They can't lead as spontaneous an existence. I feel my life is complete. Maybe one day I'll find there is a gap which only a child will fill. Now I have a life that would be completely changed by a child."

- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 03:01:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

Leap of Faith unhappiness


The take on 'Faith.' (film 'Leap of Faith') (Brief Article)
Entertainment Weekly; 12/18/1992; Wells, Jeffrey

NO MOVIE has inspired more gossipmongering this season than Paramount's Leap of Faith (see story on page 24), the Steve Martin-Debra Winger drama about a phony faith healer. The most repeated phrases about the film, opening Dec. 18: "A rush job." "Unhappy stars." "The hard-luck movie that prompted Paramount chairman Brandon Tartikoff to resign."

How do such stories get started? Here's how:

* Murmuring began last May when director Adrian Lyne refused Paranount's demand that he deliver Indecent Proposal, the Robert Redford-Demi Moore drama, in time for a Christmas '92 release. This left Faith - which began shooting in late June, even later than Indecent did - as the studio's only holiday headliner. Producer Michael Manheim insists that Faith "was always seen as a Christmas movie. It was planned out very carefully." Yet the loss of Indecent put the pressure on Faith.

* Things got off to a bumpy start when producer Daniel Melnick (L.A Story) bolted just before filming over a squabble with studio boss Stanley Jaffe. The official cause was money, but insiders say it was animosity between the two.

* Producer David Picker joined Manheim in assuming the reins, but the production was stressful. Martin has said publicly he's "ecstatic" about the finished film, but the actor recently suggested to a talent agent that, based on his Faith experience, "he doesn't think he'll be making a movie with Paramount again for a while."

- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 03:00:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

Oh Godot


Waiting for Godot. (Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York) (theater reviews)
Time; 11/21/1988; William, A. Henry III

Financially, Lincoln Center's Waiting for Godot was a triumph before it started rehearsals. The combination of an all-star cast, headed by Robin Williams and Steve Martin, and a run limited to seven weeks in a 291-seat theater made the show a sellout. In fact, the box office never even opened to the general public: the Manhattan arts complex's 36,000 drama subscribers were enough to fill the 16,000 places more than twice over.

Artistically, Williams and Martin, as comics of quicksilver intelligence and bleak vision, seem eminently suited to play Samuel Beckett's battered tramps. Oscar winner F. Murray Abraham (Amadeus) and performance artist Bill Irwin are nonpareil casting for the pompous landlord and his slavish manservant. Director Mike Nichols, a winner of eight Tony Awards, has an apt gift for seamless transitions from farce to ferocity.

Yet the show that opened for review this week sadly recalled the 1956 U.S. debut, in which Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell found the laughs, and interpolated a few more, without grasping the work's tragic austerity. Williams and Martin may comprehend the play but do not show faith in it. Although the puns and pratfalls come mostly from Beckett, there are inexcusable interjections, and the emotional force is dissipated in kickshaws and clowning.

Beckett sees human existence as haplessly ephemeral -- eroded away, the very moment it is lived, by aging and pain and forgetfulness and death. ''They give birth astride of a grave,'' one of the characters cries out in the play's most memorable line. The barren landscape of Godot is not recognizably our world. The fetid tramps sleep in ditches and are beaten by nameless others in the night. But their frustrated yearning to be recognized and their sense of life as perpetual diminishment should seem universal. Instead, the supreme existentialist tragedy of the 20th century has been reduced to a heartwarming revue sketch about the homeless.

The chief sinner is Williams. When the slave Lucky makes a long, anguished speech, a flux of debased knowledge, Williams enacts the audience's presumed boredom at having to think. He scampers. He pounds the ground. He thrusts a big bone into the slave's hands as though it were an Oscar and tells him to ''thank the Academy.'' As Martin feigns death, Williams hovers over him, murmuring the pet name ''Didi, Didi,'' then segues into the theme from The Twilight Zone. Martin is never so outrageous, but his familiar cool-guy strut and laid-back vocalisms keep him from inhabiting his character. Irwin is grayly competent as Lucky. The only really satisfying performance is Abraham's. Hugely self-satisfied in the first act, blind and pathetic in the second, he steals the show by simply acting his role while the stars are embellishing theirs.

After the stage run closes Nov. 27, the production is expected to be taped for TV. It may work better in that format. Even onstage, if audience members can forget the Beckett masterpiece that is being obliterated, this Godot calls to mind some of the best surreal comic sketches on Saturday Night Live -- a show on which all the principal actors except the pristine Abraham have appeared.
- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 02:59:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

Steve takes credit for movie's great moments... again


Chatter. (Eddie Murphy) (column)
People Weekly; 3/25/1985; Stark, John

JUST A WILD AND CRAZY LIE: Possibly the most famous scene in movie musical history is Gene Kelly's umbrella dance through the downpour in Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain. At the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award presentation to Kelly, Steve Martin broke up the audience when he modestly reminisced, "I guess out of everyone here, I go back the farthest with Gene. I remember one day I stopped by to see him and my good friend Stanley Donen and they said, "This damned weather!' And I said, "Well, shoot it anyway.' And Donen said, "But what about this damned lamppost?' And I said, "Leave it in.' But Gene said, "Well, what do I do with it?' And I told him: "Well, when you get to the lamppost, just swing around it a couple of times.' Well, ladies and gentlemen, the rest is history.'

****

- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 02:55:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

One of Steve's old TV shows


George Burns comedy week. (television program reviews)
People Weekly; 9/23/1985; Jarvis, Jeff

CBS (Wed., Sept. 18, 9:30 p.m. ET) George just introduces the show. And that's nice. Then Steve Martin takes over, off-camera, as an executive producer of this anthology series, which will have different stars, scripts and directors each week. You can sense Martin's subtle insanity in this premiere about a woman--Catherine (SCTV) O'Hara--whose roller skates are missing a wheel or two and who believes she's a bomb defuser one moment, a pilot the next, an NFL wide receiver the next. She escapes from her sanatorium and falls in love with a cop, Tim (Animal House) Matheson. The first show is sweet and entertaining. If the series can keep up that quality, it may earn a higher grade. For now we'll wait and see and give it a B.

- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 02:52:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

Prognosticate not, oh Time


The wooing of David Letterman. (CBS competes with NBC for late night TV host)
Time; 12/21/1992; Zoglin, Richard

"WHAT ARE YOUR HOURS?" Steve Martin wanted to know. Appearing as a guest on Late Night with David Letterman last week, Martin surveyed the studio with approving nods, probed the host for details about his employment perks and asked to try out his chair. "The only reason I'm doing this," he commented, "is I happen to be friendly with NBC."

And so the barrage of "Is Letterman leaving?" jokes begins. The late-night host, whose unhappiness with NBC has been a running gag for years, now has a whole new arena for backstage barbs: he has embraced a rich offer from rival network CBS.No doubt there will be guests offering career advice, wisecracks about contract negotiations, maybe even "The Top 10 Things Dave Wants to Ask Dan Rather." Networks have battled over high-priced stars before, but never so publicly for such an extended period. A guide to the principal players and the action so far:

DAVID LETTERMAN, after a decade as host of the funniest hour on TV, begins to feel restless in his late-late (12:35 a.m. est) time slot. But when the job he covets -- host of the Tonight show -- becomes available, it goes to Jay Leno. With his NBC contract expiring next spring, Letterman hires a new agent, Hollywood power broker Michael Ovitz, and starts entertaining offers. Everyone from the Fox Network (which wants to team Letterman in a late-night bloc with Chevy Chase) to major syndicators like Viacom (which offers Letterman additional exposure on its cable networks MTV and VH-1) weighs in with lucrative bids.

CBS, long a weak also-ran in late night, sees a chance to become a contender in the increasingly competitive time period. After an eight-month courtship (which began when broadcast group president Howard Stringer approached Letterman at an awards ceremony in April), the network fashions a deal that would pay Letterman more than $14 million a year to move his show, more or less intact, to CBS at 11:30. Letterman would get other benefits as well, including ownership of his program and a chance to produce a companion show at 12:30. Letterman tells his current employer that he would like to accept CBS's offer.

NBC has a headache. According to a deal struck with Letterman in the fall, the network has one month to match or better CBS's offer. But to do so, it would most likely have to offer him the Tonight show job, something NBC executives have ruled out. The network's dilemma: if it doesn't replace Leno with Letterman, it must be prepared to watch Leno compete against Letterman.

No one ever said replacing a TV legend would be easy, but NBC's problems following Johnny Carson's retirement from Tonight last May have been worse than anyone could have predicted. Picking Leno as Carson's successor seemed a logical move at the time; Leno, after all, had drawn good ratings as Carson's permanent guest host. But Letterman, once regarded as Carson's heir apparent, was publicly grumpy at being passed over. And Leno, a well-liked and hardworking comic, has suffered a shocking run of bad publicity, much of it stemming from the hardball booking tactics employed by his departed executive producer Helen Kushnick.

Now comes the second-guessing. "NBC seems to have made the wrong call [for the Tonight show]," says Grant Tinker, former NBC chairman. "I think David should have been the one." Another top TV executive contends it was a "monumental blunder" for NBC to pick Leno over Letterman: "They put themselves in the position of angering a real marketable asset, of which they have precious few." A member of the Letterman camp argues that dumping Leno is the only way for NBC to salvage its 30-year dominance in late night. "Leno is destined for failure," he says. "NBC has a chance to right a wrong."

Though there have been reports that NBC president Robert Wright favors Letterman for the Tonight job, NBC program executives insist they are happy with Leno and contemplate no change. Leno's ratings, they point out, are on the rise, from a low of 4.1 in August to 4.6 for the important November sweeps. That is still substantially behind Carson's 5.4 score of a year earlier, but it does include a slightly higher proportion of the young viewers most sought by advertisers. Opinion on Madison Avenue is mixed: some call Leno's performance disappointing; others are upbeat. "Leno is holding up quite well with all the competition that has been thrown against him," says Richard J. Kostyra, executive vice president at ad agency J. Walter Thompson.

Whatever Leno's performance, there is no assurance that Letterman, whose hip, edgy irreverence seems to alienate as many viewers as it attracts, could do any better. "Dave is a unique personality with a very defined audience makeup," says an NBC executive. "We don't know that that will work at 11:30." Money is also an argument in favor of the status quo; Leno makes just $3 million a year. (Letterman currently pulls in $6 million.) NBC, moreover, has lined up an attractive candidate to replace Letterman: Dana Carvey of Saturday Night Live.

Not that NBC is ready to surrender Letterman just yet. The network could offer him other inducements in lieu of the Tonight spot, such as a series of prime-time specials. If NBC can match CBS's offer, Letterman is obliged by his contract to remain. nbc executives will argue that CBS's 11:30 time period is partly illusory, since roughly a third of CBS's affiliates delay the network's late-night programming (currently a rotating series of crime shows) in favor of syndicated fare like Love Connection or M*A*S*H reruns.

Still, a Letterman-vs.-Leno matchup would be one of the most intriguing in TV history. Though they are nearly the same age (Letterman is 45, Leno 42) and have similar roots in stand-up comedy, the two seem to represent different show-business generations. Letterman, with his subversive antics and ironic attitude, does not so much act as host for a talk show as satirize talk shows. He is following a trail blazed by Carson, who introduced a self-parodying subtext. Carson's famous "savers" -- ad-libs to salvage jokes that bombed -- along with his conspiratorial asides to the audience during corny bits like Aunt Blabby and Carnac, were a way of making the comedian himself the butt of the joke.

Leno, however, is a throwback to a pre-Carson era. He barrels through his joke-packed monologue with scarcely a sidelong glance, and cackles cheerfully at every lame anecdote that guests toss out. He rarely apologizes for bad material or steps out from behind the performer's mask. He still believes, almost quaintly, in the possibility of doing a comedic talk show without irony. At a time when everyone from Dennis Miller to Garry Shandling has ripped open the genre for ridicule, Leno's mission seems almost heroic.

And maybe doomed. After more than six months as Tonight's host, Leno is wearing badly. His monologues, though more incisive than Carson's, have grown wearying in their rat-a-tat impersonality. His chipper demeanor during interviews is too forced, and he lacks warmth. Letterman, even in his worst moments of cranky boredom ("It's hot in here!"), makes more human contact. No telling whether Letterman can make it as a mainstream attraction and topple his rival. But if he does, the Tonight-style talk show just may bite the dust along with Leno.
- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 02:49:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

Steve at Knotts Berry Farm


Knott's Berry Farm theater celebrates its 40th anniversary. (Originated from Orange County Register)
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service; 5/9/1994; Saari, Laura

BUENA PARK, Calif. _ Way before he was a wild-and-crazy guy, before ``Excccuuuse me,'' before ``The Jerk'' and ``All of Me'' and ``Roxanne,'' before he was big-time box office, Steve Martin was clad in plaid and standing on a street corner at Knott's Berry Farm, hawking his talents to visiting tourists for $3 a show.

Martin was 18 when he landed his first real acting job at the Bird Cage Theatre, a tented stage at the Buena Park amusement park.

And like so many talents who sharpened their craft at the Bird Cage, Martin feels an uncommon affection and gratitude for the place.

``It served me my entire life,'' Martin, 48, recalled last month. ``I look back on it as one of the great learning periods of my life in show business. You learn almost everything there is to know about audiences.''

Recently, at a private party at the amusement park, Martin and a host of other actors celebrated the 40th anniversary of the theater and paid tribute to its founder, George Stuart McFarland, 86, whose stage name is George Stuart.

The Bird Cage is old-fashioned audience-participation theater, straight out of the stages of the Wild West. The hero always wins. And the villain always gets his just reward _ offstage. At the Bird Cage at least, violence is kept in its place.

The theater launched several major and minor celebrities, including Martin, Dean Jones of Disney pictures and Broadway fame, Lauren Tewes of ``Love Boat,'' Skip Young from ``Ozzie and Harriet'' and Kathy Westmoreland, who sang with Elvis.

Knott's founder Walter Knott, who built a replica of Independence Hall at the park that was so authentic it attracts history buffs, wanted like mad to transport the original Bird Cage Theatre out of Tombstone, Ariz., in 1954. He couldn't get it; a local zealot stepped in and had the tent designated a historic landmark.

So he built a replica of the tent, adding a sense of amusement and adventure to the actors who have had to go on with the show, sometimes shouting their lines, as the tent rippled in high winds, trapped the muggy summer heat and thundered in monsoons.

Although the plots and format draw from the late 19th century, a more jaded modern audience reacts with enthusiasm _ even glee _ at the chance to become part of the drama. They're invited to boo the villain, whistle at the sex symbol, coach the innocent heroine and cheer the hero.

It's corny as all get-out, but people seem to allow themselves to be caught up in the goo. The Knott's melodrama has even developed a small cult following _ people who come back to see the performances every week.

``It's nice to see the good guy win,'' said Ann Bentley, a tourist from San Francisco who watched a recent show.

``And you know who the good guys are,'' said her husband, John Bentley.

Even today, when the pink-frocked heroine, Heather Harmony (Kathryn Burns), peers out from behind her sausage curls and asks the audience if she should go away with the villain, visitors practically come out of their chairs: ``No! Don't go!''

``They're allowed to react,'' said Jones, who played Dr. Varick in the film ``Beethoven'' and has a host of films and Broadway musicals under his belt. ``They can show displeasure, approval. You can't do that with a television set or a movie screen. It's a new thing called interactive media, but it started about 3,000 years ago.''

For Steve Martin, experience at the theater was a way of getting a ``leg up'' on other actors, because of the confidence he gained performing four or five shows a day _ sometimes for 200 people, other times for six.

In the early days, actors were required between shows to perform olios _ four-minute song-and-dance acts of their own creation _ and that's where Martin perfected his stand-up comedy act.

Martin said he learned about timing from McFarland, and he also learned to keep going when everything wasn't coming off as planned. McFarland's favorite phrase: ``There's always the next night.''

McFarland remembered hiring Martin because he was ``well-groomed.'' Only later did he realize he had a great talent on his stage.

``He was the only one who stuck to the script,'' McFarland said. ``I used to tell the actors, this script was written many, many years ago, and if you try to put in one-liners and ad libs and funny lines, you'll get into trouble.''

But ad lib they did. Doing the same show five times a day week after week sometimes got monotonous. To keep the humor fresh, the actors often played pranks on each other. Martin went on stage once to uproarious laughter, and only after he exited did he realize someone had put talcum powder under his derby. Every time he lifted it, a cloud of smoke went up.

``We'd do crazy things to keep ourselves from getting bored,'' said former actor and lounge act John Stuart, who later built up a multimillion-dollar casino-show empire.

``Go fetch the ax!'' Steve Martin said to him, night after night, in the show. One night Stuart went to fetch the ax, and Martin had wired it to the wall. The show had to go on, so Stuart judo-chopped his way through the wall. Stuart retaliated by placing a water balloon down Martin's pants just before Martin went on: ``The balloon rested safely in his crotch,'' Stuart said. ``He went on and did the show. He had no choice.''

Old Walter Knott, the amusement park founder, believed in entrepreneurship, and the Bird Cage was a separate profit center in the park. Earning $3 a show, the actors had to go out and bark on the corner to draw in an audience.

``We'd have to drag them in,'' Stuart said. ```Hurry, hurry! Right this way! ``Mystery of the Orient'' is showing today! For one thin dime, you'll have the chance of a lifetime.' We had to find our audience _ and I became a tremendous marketeer. It's nothing for me now to walk into a convention of 3,000 people in Las Vegas. I know how to herd them.''

Stuart so relishes his days on the stage at Knott's (``It was my home, the most happy part of my life'') that he transformed his 20-acre Arabian horse ranch in Las Vegas into a small version of the berry farm.

``The Bird Cage was my springboard and my security blanket,'' said Stuart, who worked there seven years. The flexibility of the job at the theater allowed him to go to California State University, Fullerton and to work night jobs, singing at lounges throughout the county _ most notably the Cellar at the Disneyland Hotel and the Captain Greenhorn Lounge at the Quality Inn across from Disneyland.

For Dean Jones, 63, the Bird Cage allowed him the chance to be discovered.

Fresh out of the naval Air Corps, without a stitch of acting experience, he was among the original cast members when the theater opened in 1954. He played the Bird Cage for a year, then he was discovered and signed at MGM studios. He has starred in 34 films, 10 of them produced by Disney, including ``The Love Bug'' and ``Blackbeard's Ghost.''

Knott's founder Walter Knott was a teetotaler, but that didn't stop Jones from filling the water cooler backstage half full of vodka one night.

``We were all staggering around, practically falling off the stage by the end of the play,'' Jones said. He could remember only the first line of his solo song, ``Nothing could be finer but to be in Carolina in the morning,'' and he kept singing it over and over, as the audience roared, thinking he was doing an expert job of playing a drunk.

Like Martin, Jones learned about audiences and timing from his Bird Cage experience.

``When they're throwing spit wads at you on stage, you get an immediate reaction,'' he said. ``It teaches you that there is a huge animal out there that you better keep satiated, because if you don't, it will come on to the stage and devour you.'' One man in the audience so disliked Jones' performance that he broke Jones' nose.

The pranks have slowed down somewhat with the current cast _ and a few of the bloopers have been built right into the script. The backdrop river on the ``Riverboat Revenge'' set, for example, gets stuck in every show. But the audience is still booing and hissing as loud as ever.

``My notion is that people crave the chance to express themselves,'' said Don Forney, who has acted in Bird Cage productions for 31 years. ``And we're giving them carte blanche.'' He believes that about 70 percent of his audience has never seen live theater previous to their experience at Knott's.

``They come here,'' he said, ``and they learn that theater doesn't have to be boring.''


- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 02:42:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

Why? I just liked it.


Roxanne. (movie reviews)
Time; 6/15/1987; Corliss, Richard

Lonely Guy Gets a Nose Job ROXANNE Directed by Fred Schepisi Screenplay by Steve Martin

Nice looking fellow. Even features, crinkly eyes, a ready smile,muscles taut from gym work, autumnal hair with a fine early frost. He could be a cousin of his fellow Rocky Mountain resident Robert Redford. Then look closer and find a superhero's face as it might have been drawn by Wallace Wood for a Mad comic-book parody. The jawline, a shade too prominent, entertains the rumor of buf- foonery. The smile is one of unwarranted self-assurance. His eye squint seems not to have registered that the world sees him differently: as a preening oaf. With every gesture he is screaming, Help! I'm a clown trapped in a leading man's body!

All these are signals sent out by Steve Martin, who is too smartand funny to be fit for a movie idol's straitjacket. He began, in the early 1970s, as a stand-up comic with an unusual persona: a guy determined against all odds -- lack of charm or talent, for example -- to be the life of the party. In his first movies too he made mock of his Waspy features by playing dimwits and cuckolds. Would he restrict himself to updating Jerry Lewis when he could be Cary Grant? Not at all. For with Pennies from Heaven Martin essayed nostalgic surrealism; in The Lonely Guy he was a mensch for all seasons; All of Me provided him a tour de force of physical comedy; his turn in Little Shop of Horrors boasted a wondrously manic concentration of energy. By now he was becoming the snazziest farceur, and maybe the most appealing movie comic, of the '80s. Now he had only to try a romantic lead, as if to say, I can do that. Too. Hence Roxanne.

C.D. Bales (Martin) runs the local volunteer firehouse, manned by a septet of gentle stooges. One of these is the hunky, clunky Chris (Rick Rossovich), who is attracted to a pretty astronomer named Roxanne (Daryl Hannah). C.D. goes big for her as well but is inhibited by his amiable reserve -- and by a nose that looks like a fairy-tale Nixon's after he'd told a lie. So C.D. agrees to become Chris' voice and soul, whispering the music of love for Chris to shout up to Roxanne's balcony . . . But you've heard this story before. It is Cyrano de Bergerac replanted in rural Washington State. Chivalric C.D. is no swordsman; he duels with tennis racquet and walking stick. Rostand's purple poetry is replaced with C.D.'s Hallmarkian attempt to turn palship into passion: ''Why should we sip from a teacup when we can drink from the river?''

Martin, who wrote the pretty-funny, too-soppy script, means to drink from the river this time. He wants it all: laughs, tears, low comedy, uplift. It doesn't quite happen, partly because the movie begs for poignance like an orphaned puppy, partly because modern plastic surgery makes the plot anachronistic, partly because, even with his Cyranose, C.D. is a darned sight more attractive than his beefy rival. Aaaahh, who cares, as long as Steve Martin gets a chance to strut his physical grace, wrap his mouth around clever dialogue, clamber up to rooftops like a Tarzan of the Northwest, give new life to the old-fashioned nobility of the love letter, and drink wine through his nose? ''Party trick,'' he shrugs. It's a neat trick, being Steve Martin. He's so good; his movies will get even better. Rushes

- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 02:36:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

Steve oldies


Chatter. (Steve Martin) (column)
People Weekly; 1/14/1985; Small, Michael

Emcee Steve Martin made it nearly impossible to avoid spending money at an auction to raise funds for L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art. "There are other ways of bidding besides raising your paddle,' he told the crowd. "If you flick your ear, you'll be considered a bidder. Anyone taking a drink is a bidder. Coughing, smiling or smoking will be considered a bid. Standing will be considered a bid, also sitting. "Looking out at Aaron Spelling, the multimillionaire creator of a long line of prime-time TV hits, Martin added, "Anyone named Spelling will be considered to be bidding.' Spelling smiled and didn't disappoint Steve. He bought two landscape paintings for a total of $4,500.

- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 02:30:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

"I can't tell you what this means, ... but I can tell you it means something"


Fresh images burst from Whitney Biennial
The Toronto Star; 4/10/2004; Peter Goddard Toronto Star
Edition: ONT
Section: Arts

It may not have the name-power glitz of the Academy Awards, but the Whitney Biennial is every bit the glamorizing take on the American Dream as you can find.

It's also been criticized as much as the Oscars, for much the same reason The best work gets ignored. But after decades of duds, the "2004 Biennial Exhibition" affirms that the American Dream is alive and well and living in computer software and other familiar places in the new material world.
Yes, you can touch the fake fur and dig Super Mario. Madonna would be pleased.

This is not the whole story in this multi-layered, multi-context bonanza. Traditional video is still huge (lots of naked writhing in the mud in Chloe Piene's Blackmouth, 2003). Painting undergoes a revival (with Laura Owens and others). Gross-outs abound (particularly in Sue de Beer's room of fairytale video porn, Hans und Grete (2002).

"Generational jockeying" is another subtext, wrote Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times.

People agree that the 2004 Biennial is a hit, the first in recent memory. And to my mind it's a hit because some of it reflects a new kind of thinking about art.

But that brings us back to glamorizing. Is there such a word? There should be, to point to how much otherwise indescribable stuff is going on at the Whitney Museum of American Art. To most, this institution is more familiar as a sort of an Upper East Side art spa for matrons with long afternoons to fill.

The Whitney is crowded these days to the very toilets where - should we have been surprised? - one can also find art in the form of an incessant but not unpleasant buzz married to a low-wattage glow in a sound installation by Jim O'Rourke.

So what if no one really "gets" David Altmejd's room-filling installation, Delicate Men In Positions Of Power (2003)? The mystery is part of its allure, as it is with a lot of other pieces in the exhibition. With its Jean Genet-like juxtaposition of gems, beauty, male funk and glittering decay, Delicate Men says something rather unoriginal about the limits of power and the inevitability of death.

Go further into the exhibition and the un-gettable really gets the crowds going.

"I can't tell you what this means," said a middle-aged guide leading her troupe of women to a series of small gouaches by Laylah Ali, whose images could be taken for Martians or maybe suicide bombers.

"I can tell you that it does mean something," she added, leaving her listeners aglow with happiness. (Ali, a Boston-based artist, is best known for her Greenheads, the peaceful/scary cartoon figures with the big heads, the very figures the guide was pointing to.)

There are other ways of getting it, pointed out The Wall Street Journal's Lee Rosenbaum, noting that the recent Armoury Show - "the inaugural Whitney Buy-ennial," as he cheekily called it - offered for sale works by 64 Whitney artists.

The day I was there, actor Steve Martin - also a great collector and something of a force in Los Angeles - was scouting his next acquisitions from some of the 108 artists selected by the young troika of curators Chrissie Iles, Debra Singer and Shamin Momin, assembled by outgoing Whitney head Maxwell Anderson.

The names of most of the artists involved are familiar. Many have shown, are showing or will soon show around Manhattan.

The much-touted "find," from this year is Alec Soth, a 34-year- old Minnesota photographer favouring large Chromogenic colour prints from his series, Sleeping By The Mississippi.

These are gorgeous pieces, their formality leavened by just a hint of something twisted, as if Walker Evans and Shelby Lee Adams were working together in the same photographic brain. Like, you don't want to really know the sensually explosive pair of women in Mother And Daughter, Davenport IA. (2002) Or, if you do, you'd have to get ready to rumble. Still, as "finds" go, Soth doesn't represent much of a stretch.

If anything, the selection process hummed along with veteran artists such as the late Stan Brakhage, whose wild-on-the-streets video in the likes of Persian Series 13-18 (2001), has the wonderfully unsettling effect of acid jazz being played over top of soundtrack for a sitcom.

And if the show makes some established art stars, like Cecily Brown, look dated, it makes others look terrific when paired with the younger admirers. A wall given over to painter David Hockney in his best midafternoon poolside California mode simply blows away the fine Hockney-influenced work from Elizabeth Peyton.

But where the generational watershed really shows up and what defines and gives appeal to this Biennale - is how young artists have picked up on new imagery and have allowed the images free reign to take us on a ride. Call this software thinking, not tech thinking, where the program shapes the image. In a way, it's art calling its own shots.

Tech thinking is found in Marina Abramovic's installation, Count On Us (2003), a dramatic, admirable and wry video performance that plunges angrily into the mess of Balkan politics. Really at issue is the manipulation of the video experience, as it gives us of the sense of sneaking a peek - video's terrific at conveying the look and mood of surveillance - at a foreign land where a skeleton (the artist is the costume) conducts a children's choir.

Software thinking comes with Super Mario Clouds (2003), by Cory Arcangel/BEIGE, a hacked Super Mario sequence in which a speech balloon above the sleeping digital critter's head is filled with electronic squiggles. Super Mario Clouds isn't half the work that Count On Us is. But like Jeremy Blake's digital animation, Reading Ossie Clark (2003), it comes from way outside the museum walls.

This is what a Biennale should be about, and quite often is about at the Whitney.
- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 02:28:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

Steve to be honored again -- Museum of Mod Art, NY


SUZY: WHEN IN ROME...CRUZ CONTROL...THOSE HEARST GIRLS.
WWD; 4/7/2004; Mehle, Aileen

****
Co-chairmen David Rockefeller, Ronald Lauder and Robert Menschel are getting ready for the Museum of Modern Art's 36th annual Party in the Garden on June 7, which has always been a memorable event in New York. The dinner will take place at Roseland Ballroom and, after dinner, guests will indulge in a bit of dancing, which is expected to last for a long time and which is what a ballroom is for. The guest of honor for the evening will be Steve Martin, the actor, comedian, author, playwright and producer, whose first original play in 1993, "Picasso at the Lapin Agile," received critical acclaim and is still mounted in productions worldwide. For 30 years, Steve has been acquiring artworks that span from the late 19th century to the present day, including pieces from such artists as Seurat, Lichtenstein, Bacon, Picasso, Hopper and David Hockney. The Party in the Garden will support the Museum's annual fund, as well as another special fund for the restoration of the magnificent Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden.

****
- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 02:13:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

Joos zot Ah woood zrow zis een


Steve Martin jouera l'inspector Clouseau dans un remake de la Panthère Rose
Agence France Presse; 11/18/2003
11-18-2003

Le comique américain Steve Martin

Le comique américain Steve Martin interprètera le rôle de l'inspecteur Clouseau, un policier français maldroit, dans un remake de la "Panthère Rose", la célèbre série originellement interprétée par Peter Sellers, a annoncé lundi la maison de production Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Le tournage du nouveau film de la "Panthère Rose" débutera l'an prochain dans les studios de la MGM, juste à temps pour marquer le 40e anniversaire du lancement de la série classique. La production de la nouvelle comédie, intitulée "La Naissance de la Panthère Rose", doit commencer au printemps 2004, ont déclaré Chris McGurk, vice-président de MGM, et Michael Nathanson, président de MGM Pictures.

"La série de la Panthère Rose est l'une de celles qui a rencontré le plus grand et le plus long succès à la MGM et nous sommes fiers et heureux d'avoir réuni une équipe aussi créative et excellente pour emmener le film dans une nouvelle direction passionnante", ont déclaré les responsables.

Steve Martin imprimera son empreinte personnelle sur le personnage de Jacques Clouseau dans le film qui doit être produit par Robert Simonds et dirigé par Shawn Levy, dont la dernière comédie "Just Married" a rapporté plus de 100 millions de dollars au box office dans le monde.

Ce film sera le 9e de la série originelle. Son célèbre thème musical composé par Henry Mancini avait gagné la récompense d'un Grammy, tandis que le personnage dessiné de la Panthère rose avait remporté un Oscar avant d'avoir une existence autonome en tant que dessin animé.

- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 02:04:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS

 

An old profile, but one I don't have on the site


Steve Martin: wild and serious guy.
Saturday Evening Post; 11/1/1989; Millner, Cork
STEVE MARTIN: WILD AND SERIOUS GUY

Steve Martin is sitting with three friends at an umbrella-shaded table in a Southern California restaurant. He sips from his cup of coffee and listens to the bubbling water of the patio fountain. Then, Martin feels one coming--a Steve Martin fan. He hunches over, pulls the collar of his leather jacket around his neck, and shifts his eyes warily behind the jet-black sunglasses.

A large woman in a print housedress jiggles up to him. She giggles and thrusts a napkin and a ballpoint pen in front of Martin's face. He smiles wanly and scribbles his autograph on the napkin. She blabs happily and then wobbles away across the patio flagstones. Returning to her table, she whispers to her husband, "He didn't even say anything funny."

That is difficult for Steve Martin. He doesn't carry around a stock of one-liners like Bob Hope or George Burns, nor can he "turn on" at the drop of a straight line like Jonathan Winter or Robin Williams. Yet because he was the most phenomenally successful comedian of the 1970s, he is expected to "say something funny." To his fans he will always be that happy "jerk" onstage, that "wild and crazy guy" with the childlike comedy, the happy feet, the rabbit ears, and the balloon animals.

Unlike his stage and screen persona, Martin is a very serious man. "Steve really is bright and sophisticated," says Shelley Duvall, who starred with him in the hit movie Roxanne. He is also a very private man. His personal life and his past relationship with Bernadette Peters are taboo, as is the time he spent with Linda Ronstadt. When his busy moviemaking schedule permits, he and his wife, Victoria Tennant (War and Remembrance), travel to their weekend retreat in Santa Barbara, a home built like a concrete bunker, more ominous than inspiring. Martin's obsession is collecting 19th-century art. He is a serious collector, and the walls of his home are filled with paintings by such artists as Mary Cassatt and Winslow Homer.

Other than improving his art collection, Martin wants to secure his niche as a serious comedy actor in motion pictures. "After I gave up the stand-up comedy routines, I really wanted to be successful in motion pictures," Martin says.

It hasn't been easy. The comedian had creative problems transferring his own wacky brand of '70s humor to the movies of the 1980s. His first starring film, The Jerk, which came from Martin's fertile imagination, set him off toward his goal. It was a resounding success--with his fans, if not the critics.

Then Martin's next movie, Pennies from Heaven, an art-deco musical fantasy, confounded audiences and bombed at the box office. The comedian did a little better with Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, whose gimmick was to intersperse the new scenes with old black-and-white footage of Humphrey Bogart and Alan Ladd. But the movie was not well-received by Martin fans.

In The Man with Two Brains, the jokes were zany and Martin thought he was almost on track. He and the producers were stunned when it did poorly at the box office. The Lonely Guy followed next and died quickly. "It was sort of a stinker," Martin admits.

Martin's search for his kind of movie, a mix of serious comedy with burlesque bits, began to jell with the 1984 release All of Me (costarring Lily Tomlin), which made use of his gifts for physical comedy. "I was very happy with All of Me," Martin says. "It's the first film I have done that is funny without having to think about being funny."

In 1987 came Roxanne, a contemporary version of Cyrano de Bergerac. The reviews were great. When Time magazine praised Martin with a complimentary cover story, he felt his move dreams had come to fruition.

Martin's recent portrayal of a worried father in the guise of a goofball in Parenthood has secured his place on the cinematic scene. In this rich role as the father of a modern nuclear family (Mary Steenburgen plays the mother), Martin is able to balance his serious maturity with his wild and crazy instincts--this time in a logical way. At a party, Martin, in a makeshift cowboy outfit, fills in for an absent clown. The comedian is able to play a jerk--but not be one.

The movies Roxanne and Parenthood made Martin a serious screen comedian--not just a fad like Hula-Hoops or pet rocks, not just a flash from the '70s. He would never have to go back to being that wild and crazy guy on stage again.

The Steven Martin comedy that came out of the '70s was, well--weird. It was labeled silly, brainless, and Disneyesque. Newsweek called Martin the "ultimate West Coast wacko."

Carl Reiner once told Martin that he looked like a guy who looked at Fred Astaire and said, "Hey, I can do that--watch." The critic Pauline Kael said it more succinctly: Martin's stage act, she said, was a guy acting like a comedian and the audience acting like an audience.

"I always looked at my solo stage comedy as a success of timing," Martin says. "I had the right act at the right ime. During the '60s I started formulating my comic ideas--I knew that the seriousness of the social '60s would eventually pass into the silly '70s, and I was getting ready for it. When it came, I was ready. I was silly, but I was avant-garde.

"If I had to categorize myself at that time, I would say I had sort of--I wouldn't say a gift--but rather a supply of energy on stage. I was real energetic--and real dumb."

Dumb? He'd stand in front of audiences of 20,000 and turn balloons into animals or sing his one-million-selling ditty, "King Tut." He'd say: "Now, the nose-on-the-microphone routine," and he'd put his nose on the head of the microphone; then he'd say, "Thank you"--and the audiences howled.

"If I just start talking funny-type things and never give the audience a punch line, eventually their tension is going to grow so much they will start laughing on their own," Martin says. "They'll start choosing things to be funny, which is the strongest kind of humor. they have determined what is funny, not me. The laugh I like to get is 'What? I don't know why I am laughing.'

"Beside laughs there is the real thrill of timing. That's the greatest fun of all. When you're resting, waiting, and you've got the next line in your head and you're just waiting for that little intimate moment . . . things are really flowing. Charged. Like a ballet."

How did Steve Martin, a basically shy, almost introverted "nice guy," become the goofball who paraded before thousands of peole with bunny ears on his head?

"You're not going to get into my past, are you?" Martin responds when told it is time to talk about his background. "Nobody cares where I grew up. Even I don't care. When I read an interview and it gets to the part where a person grew up, I turn the page."

Martin's fascination with performing evidently began when he was ten. He was hired to sell guidebooks, Mouseketeer ears, and Davy Crockett hats at Disneyland. Then at Knott's Berry Farm, he was given the opportunity at Birdcage Theater to do his newly developed magic act and try out a few comedy routines.

From there he enrolled in philosophy at UCLA. By his senior year he had switched his major to theater arts and taken a TV-writing course. In 1968, when he was only 23, he was hired to write comedy for "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour." "If I wrote anything it was: 'Here's Burl Ives,'" Martin says. "It was no big deal." Writing worked for him, and at a weekly salary of $1,500, paid the bills. but he wanted to be a performer.

"Writing for TV was like learning to swallow swords," he remembers. The closest he got to being a performer on "Smothers Brothers" was the night he played a human head on a silver platter and spouted off with several one-liners.

He was signed with the William Morris Agency as a writer. "I went in and told them I was leaving television writing to be a performer," Martin says. "The said, 'Don't do it, you'll never make it.' Well, I've heard that line in a dozen movies, so I knew I could make it. Rejection is one of my accomplishments."

After "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" was axed by CBS, Martin wrote for Soony and Cher, then Glen Campbell. He still wanted to perform, and he finally began to get on the talk shows, including, of course, "The Tonight Show."

"I guess I've been on television a lot," Martin says. "Probably 500 times; 'The Tonight Show' 35 or 40 times. I did a lot of crazy things on that show. One was reading a phone book to make people laugh. I'd pick up a phone book and read: 'Aaron Adams, 717 South Remington.' Of course, there wouldn't be a laugh, but I'd go on--'Bill Black, 982 Montrose Avenue.' Still no laugh, then Ihd take out my arrow and put it on my head and read a sillier name, like 'Mary Ann Pinball. . .' By the time it was over, I'd end up waving a rubber chicken, and then finally say: 'Don't look at me, I didn't write this junk.'"

Martin didn't write his own material for his stand-up comedy routines. "I don't know if I could sit down and write a routine that would be funny," he says. "My original act came out of a philosophical point of view. A new point of view. I was just a guy up on stage acting like a comedian."

Martin admits it was a marvelous feeling to play to audiences of hystericaly laughing people. "Yeah, that was a thrill," he says. "But there is still the thrill of looking back and saying--'I was the biggest comedian in the world.'" He pauses and reflects, "I will be very happy, if when I'm 60, I can look back and say, 'I was a very funny person in this world.'"

Steve Martin has packed away the arrows through the head, he has deflated his balloon animals, and no longer has happy feet. After all, that really wasn't Steve Martin. It wasn't even close. The real Steve Martin is a "wild and serious guy."

- posted by sookeyjane 4/25/2004 01:56:00 AM PERMALINK 0 COMMENTS