By Ray Bennett
Carl Reiner greeted me in his hotel room in Toronto and said, ‘Steve Martin is your No. 1 fan.’
Performers become fans of critics, of course, only when we write something they like. Their film ‘All of Me’ is an agreeably silly piece of nonsense in which the soul of a bitter old woman named Edwina, played by Lily Tomlin, intended for a beautiful young woman named Terry, played by Victoria Tennant (pictured with Martin) is transferred instead into the body of a young lawyer played by Martin. Edwina controls the right side of his body and he controls the left so that for him just to walk down the street is like a three-legged race on two feet. I thought his performance was hilarious and wrote that he was the funniest physical comedian since Charlie Chaplin. ‘He loved that,’ Reiner said. Continue reading
TV broadcaster Bill Moyers regarded the elite as the enemy
Veteran TV newsman Bill Moyers, former New York Newsday publisher and press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson, has died aged 91. As a broadcaster, he often spun off bestselling books from his TV productions and in 1989 he produced a documentary series with accompanying book titled ‘A World of Ideas’. I did a phone interview with him about it for a short-lived national U.S. magazine called Inside Books. I admired Moyers greatly and I was extremely pleased after my story was published when he wrote to say: ‘I don’t know how you managed to get in so much detail so accurately from a phone interview but I am very impressed and grateful.’
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Bill Moyers talks candidly with Ray Bennett Continue reading →