From New York Magazine, a big feature on NYC after midnight. Several people shared their stories, including Bebe Buell:
In 1974, I was on Hudson and Horatio — it was still pretty shady over there at the time - and I could not get a cab. This big giant Cadillac pulls up, and a guy and a girl were in it. It was obviously a pimp and his girl. And the guy goes, “My name is Magic. Do you need a ride?” Who in their right mind would get in that car? But I did. His name was Magic, her name was Angel, and it was like a scene out of a Scorsese movie. I just remember the tranny girls yelling, “You go, girl!” They thought I had gotten a trick or something. I don’t know what made me think it was going to be okay. Angel let me know, “Don’t worry, honey, we’re not serial killers.” And for some godforsaken reason, I believed them.
And Alec Baldwin, who has always been interested in Saturday Night Live:
I was told that there was a place called Louis’s Toy Bar on the Upper East Side. And it was this narrow sliver of a shop that obviously had sold antique clothes or something. And this guy Louis who owned it would put out plates of, like, Velveeta cheese and crackers and very modest kinds of canapes. I was told, back then, that all the cast of the original Saturday Night Live went there after the show; this was their haunt, this was their after-party-after-party Copacabana. And I went there countless times, eating Velveeta cheese, waiting for them, and they never came. They never showed up.
And Lydia Lunch:
I made money by standing on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 8th Street, shaking down women with children, saying I worked for the Cancer Foundation, until I got \$10. I could live on that. The rent at my apartment on 12th Street between A and B was \$75 a month.
And Dr. Jason D’Amore, formerly a resident at Bellvue:
One night, we got this guy in who was riding his Harley down the FDR at high speed, and he got run over by a semi, and he comes in and is very close to death. […] So this guy, he was covered head-to-toe in iron crosses and swastikas and white-power tattoos. I’m looking around, and I’m D’Amore, and the ortho guy was Schwarzbaum, and we had to call neurosurgery, and that was Goldberg, and we intubated him and we got him stabilized and into the operating room, and he’s totally sedated, and I leaned down and said, “Dude, I just wanted you to know a bunch of Jews just saved your ass.”
And Colin Quinn:
It’s easier to be nostalgic now. It’s easier to look at it now and say, “Oh, I miss Taxi Driver.” Suddenly, we’re all like French film students who romanticize New York, even though when you lived it, it was bad. There were so many heroin dealers. If you were on, like, Avenue B and C, and somebody goes, “You want heroin?” and you said no, they’d get mad at you, like you were going browsing in a store and not buying anything. “You’re wasting our time! Trying to make money here.”
And Alexis Swerdloff:
The hand-delivered invite was a velvet-wrapped VHS tape. Five minutes and 42 seconds long, the video had Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres, Ananda Lewis, Todd Oldham, Veronica Webb, Ben Stiller, Pauly Shore, Derek Jeter, and dozens of other ’90s luminaries hyping Puff Daddy’s 29th-birthday party on November 4, 1998. Chris Rock said to leave your posse at home, Magic Johnson instructed guests to arrive at 10 p.m. on the dot, and Will Smith directed people to a 212 number in order to RSVP for the secret location. “It’s gonna be all that,” cooed Tyra Banks.
And there’s so much more…go read the whole thing. The photos are great too. Look for the one with Edith Piaf singing at a club; it’s just her in 1950 on a tiny stage with no microphone singing to people while they eat dinner. Man, if I had a time machine…
Holy cow, Alec Baldwin is the spitting image of our nation’s 13th President, Millard Fillmore.
This is from a slideshow of famous lookalikes. Fillmore looks so much like Baldwin in this 1849 Matthew Brady daguerreotype that one is forced to ask: is Alec Baldwin a time traveller and did he star on 30 Rock before or after governing our country in the 1850s?
And a podcast! It’s called Here’s the Thing and it features a different guest every two weeks.
Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin gives the listener unique entree into the lives of artists, policy makers and performers. Alec sidesteps the predictable by taking listeners inside the dressing rooms, apartments, and offices of people such as comedian Chris Rock, political strategist Ed Rollins and Oscar winner Michael Douglas. Here’s The Thing: Listen to what happens when an inveterate guest becomes a host. Subscribe now and get new interviews every two weeks.
A recent episode featured David Letterman.
Apologies in advance for the Charlie Sheen mention, but Alec Baldwin’s advice to Sheen (and, belatedly, Conan) is golden.
Conan has moved on and his great talent is undiminished by his difficult experiences. I had wanted to say to him back then what I will now offer to Charlie. You can’t win. Really. You can’t. When executives at studios and networks move up to the highest ranks, they are given a book. The book is called How to Handle Actors. And one principle held dear in that book is that no actor is greater than the show itself when the show is a hit. And, in that regard, they are often right. Add to that the fact that the actor who is torturing their diseased egos is a drug addled, porn star-squiring, near Joycean Internet ranter, and they really want you to go.
Reminds me of Frank Sinatra’s letter to George Michael.
Come on George, Loosen up. Swing, man, Dust off those gossamer wings and fly yourself to the moon of your choice and be grateful to carry the baggage we’ve all had to carry since those lean nights of sleeping on buses and helping the driver unload the instruments.
(via stellar)
Sage advice from Alec Baldwin about the Mark Sanford affair: Don’t Take the Bait.
Now is a wonderful opportunity to show the country what Democrats/liberals/progressives/unaligned learned from the Clinton era. Whatever personal problems that public officials deal with privately, leave them alone. This could happen to anyone, in any state, regardless of party. Why make the voters of South Carolina suffer while Sanford is skewered? If he wants to resign, so be it. If not, let him deal with it in private.
And Baldwin didn’t say this but I will: lefty political sites like HuffPo and TPM have and are devoting a lot of time and attention to these Republican sex scandals. Hey, they’re good for pageviews, right? That’s part of the problem too. Aren’t there more important political things going on in the world than this gossip?
A profile of Alec Baldwin by Ian Parker for the New Yorker.
He recalled a day, a few years ago, when he was driving through L.A., saw a car run a red light, smash into another car, and keep moving. Baldwin gave chase and, eventually, blocked the culprit in a cul-de-sac. Before the police arrived, the driver got out of his car — “Typical drug-addict, alcoholic, fuckhead look on his face. He was, ‘O.K., what? What? You’re chasing me. What?’ This nineteen-year-old kid, his eyes blazing. I’m thinking, I’m going to come over there and knock your teeth down your fucking throat just because you’re asking me ‘What?’ You know what, you little fuck? I saw you. I’m a pretty liberal person, but my liberalness comes from what the government should be doing with its excess of wealth. That doesn’t mean I’m not a law-and-order person. I’m the kind of person — you catch the kid who’s drunk and high and he almost killed a girl, let’s take him in and beat the shit out of him for a couple of hours. Then he’ll learn.” He laughed. “I believe that!”
Things I have enjoyed Alec Baldwin in:
The Hunt for Red October
Glengarry Glen Ross
The Departed
The Royal Tenenbaums
The Aviator
But what firmly installs Baldwin onto my list of favorite actors of all time is his many Saturday Night Live appearances. Watching Schweddy Balls and Inside the Actors Studio (with Baldwin as Charles Nelson Reilly) still brings tears of howling laughter to my eyes. I gotta bump 30 Rock to the top of my viewing queue.
Alec Baldwin must relish the opportunity to channel his rage through Jack Donaghy, the beloved heartless media executive he plays on 30 Rock, a rage in evidence at The Huffington Post in his open-skewering of the suits who own and run his show’s network.
On the problem of the studios in the ongoing WGA negotiations:
They are owned by huge, creativity-deadening corporations and operated by lawyers and marketing executives who lord over the worst creative decline I have witnessed in a long time, particularly in films. In television, companies like GE view properties like NBC the way realtors view square footage. GE does not care what is on NBC. So long as the programming is relatively inoffensive, they want to earn as much per square foot as they can.
I missed this at the time, but 30 Rock snuck in a last-minute subversive writers’ strike joke for its last pre-strike show.
For some defictionalized 30 Rock goods, t-shirts for the parent company of 30 Rock’s NBC, Sheinhardt Wig Company, can be had here.
(via glass shallot)
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